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Partnering with publishers for a better journalism experience
- curt15 7y agoAnyone remember Google Contributor back in the day? How does this compare?
- tshanmu 7y agothis would be great if it works as advertised! :D
- steve_taylor 7y agoIt’s an MVP. It doesn’t have to work.
- assafmo 7y agoSo what does viable mean?
- dpwm 7y agoIt's conceptually viable; it's just not materially viable yet. In all seriousness, I seem to remember that there was a practice of testing for viability using very similar means – basically, are people interested enough to click through, then collect emails. So perhaps this is a path to demonstrate viability by questionnaire.
- idiocratic 7y agoAn MVP should consist of the minimum work required to test an hypothesis. In this case the hypothesis is: "People would buy a browser if it offers an ad-free experience". So it's viable according to that idea. Viable doesn't mean useful though :)
- rusk 7y agoIt's not MVP it's a Kite [0]. Minimum Viable Product is an actual "thing you can use", not mere concept. It's more than a prototype. The term implies it's something you can actually ship to customers. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_balloon https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trial_balloon
- mikkelam 7y agoIf the same service could be used for paywalled news sites as well, this could be great
- stenioaraujo 7y agoI don't know how viable it maybe be for you, but that is one of the goals for Apple News Plus, to bundle newspaper subscriptions in one place.
- SanchoPanda 7y ago4.99 would not even cover the NY Times or WSJ alone.
- mirimir 7y agoThat's because their prices are ridiculously high. Sure, I want access to NY Times. But maybe I'll read 1-2 articles per day. Not the whole damn paper. Same for any other site.
- war1025 7y agoThey already track how many times you've viewed the site in order to decide when the paywall goes up. Doesn't seem like it would be that hard to track what articles you view and charge x cents / article. I enjoy reading the WSJ Opinion section, but last time I looked at the price, it was way too high to justify based on the number of articles I read.
- SanchoPanda 7y agoBlendle has been offering this service for years, though I believe they recently are backing away from it. I used it for a while several years ago, but I found using small transactions frequently to be very uncomfortable (as in off-putting, not so much inconvenient).
- mirimir 7y agoI vaguely recall Blendle. And checking, they want ~€2 per article, which is way too much. Consider that a digital subscription to The NY Times costs $250-$500 per year.[0] That's 365 days, with numerous articles published per day. But for argument sake, divide by 5000. That's just $0.05-$0.10 per article. 0) https://dannysullivan.com/new-york-times-subscription-3480 https://dannysullivan.com/new-york-times-subscription-3480
- SanchoPanda 7y agoI got the following when I tried the link to subscribe: 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.
- rusk 7y agomust be a geo-ip thing ... I got a page offering me this service for $4.99 a month EDIT never mind, once you click through to subscribe it's that survey. This whole thing seems a bit disingenuous ...
- SamWhited 7y agoIt's one of their trial site things; I doubt they expect people to go directly to it from HN, they expect people to know that these products don't actually exist yet.
- mrtweetyhack 7y agoThis is why the rich get richer
- dewey 7y agoIn case you are also wondering how that works and what's supported. Based on https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2019/02/25/exploring-alternative-funding-models-for-the-web/ https://blog.mozilla.org/futurereleases/2019/02/25/exploring... it looks like it's a collaboration with https://scroll.com/ https://scroll.com/ and supports sites like: - Vox - The Atlantic - Buzzfeed - Gizmodo - Slate
- achingtooth 7y agoSeems like a bunch of publishers that have a leftist bias. I wonder if they'll give The Daily Wire, TYT, The Daily Stormer, etc the same opportunity or if it'll just be neoliberal outlets.
- dbspin 7y agoGonna go out on a limb and guess that Firefox isn't that interesting in funding holocaust denial.
- zamadatix 7y agoI find it unlikely as well and don't blame them (they have a huge brand identity to protect) but I don't think this sort of concept really works unless it's available everywhere ad revenue is. The unique value to the end user is "an ad free web" not "a web content curator".
- driverdan 7y ago> The Daily Stormer Let's hope they don't support Neo-Nazis.
- AlexandrB 7y agoThe Daily Stormer? Really? No, I suspect that Mozilla won’t be partnering with self-identified Nazis.
- cglace 7y agoWell, my guess is they aren’t going to support a website with whom 99.99% of their users probably find reprehensible.
- gowthamgts12 7y agoIt looks like if you're a publisher you've partner up with Mozilla for this. Isn't this becoming a little dependent on Mozilla? Publishers are already dependent on Google and if Google wants to screw them over, they can. How is this different from that?
- islon 7y agoIt's not perfect, but I'd rather trust mozilla than google.
- robertAngst 7y agoI'm the other way, google is probably the best company in my lifetime. Its recent Apple exploit 0day, I'm a bit skeptical of the programming. Google has the resources to make better products.
- dangerface 7y ago> Google has the resources to make better products. True but for the past 5 years or so they have been interested in making more money not better products.
- AnIdiotOnTheNet 7y agoAnd yet I've had to switch all my Lubuntu devices to using Chrome because Firefox can't seem to manage to remain open without eventually locking up the entire system.
- eyeundersand 7y agoI've had this problem too. Although I'd rather live with it than switch back to Chrome myself.
- glenneroo 7y agoDid you try filing a bug report?
- dreen 7y agoThis looks like it's a bundling of Scroll into Firefox, probably with different UX. It seems dishonest to me if you're gonna say "Ad-Free Internet" and "We share your payment directly with the sites you read" and really only do that for 12 domains. The internet is much bigger than that. Find a way to do this for ALL sites!
- SmellyGeekBoy 7y agoTo be fair to them, they have to start somewhere. If they had to get every single site on the internet onboard as a prerequisite (as you seem to be suggesting) they'd never launch anything.
- dreen 7y agoYes I agree, it's impossible to cut a deal with every website. So a completely different solution is needed. edit: maybe I am being too harsh... maybe this is a starting point to something bigger. Let's hope!
- outime 7y agoNote the following: * 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.
- SimeVidas 7y agoFirefox already has built-in tracking protection, which blocks trackers and by extension most ads.
- jasode 7y agoAs others stated, the submitted title of "Ad-Free Internet by Firefox" overstates what this actually is: pay $4.99/month for ad-free experience on a handful of media publishers' websites[1]. (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. [1] https://scroll.com/sites https://scroll.com/sites (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.)
- Fernicia 7y agoIt's surely fair to use the page title as the HN link title.
- jasode 7y agoOk, fair enough. Before I wrote my comment, I did perform a "view source" to search for "ad-free internet" and it wasn't found. However, if one uses F12 Developer Tools to inspect the DOM, it does have: "<title>Ad-free Internet by Firefox</title>" It's interesting that that phrase is not visibly used and the big bold text people actually see just says "Support the sites you love, avoid the ads you hate". 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.
- dewey 7y agoIt's used in the tab / window heading which is pretty visible I'd say.
- matt_morgan 7y agoIt's the page title. It appears e.g. in the tab heading (but yours may be very small).
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- jelv 7y agoSo a browser with a build in Flattr / Patreon / Liberapay option. Sounds like a good option.
- pointillistic 7y agoI think this is a re-branding of Pocket that they own. Same price https://getpocket.com/premium?ep=1 https://getpocket.com/premium?ep=1
- kzrdude 7y agoSounds like a good idea since they never did communicate effectively about what pocket is and why I should get it. Even the website is vague, I'm not looking for an "ad-free space", not sure what that even means. I'm not interested in renting a room.
- eitland 7y agoSigned up. That said, this is a practical implementation of some patterns that belongs on https://userinyerface.com/game.html https://userinyerface.com/game.html ;-)
- SanchoPanda 7y agoDid you sign up to be notified or were you able to subscribe to the paid service?
- eitland 7y agoTo be notified.
- Kuinox 7y agoHow did you signed up if no one can yet ?
- ing33k 7y agoso Firefox will play the gatekeeper role now ?
- matt_morgan 7y agoMozilla has to do this to show they're trying. They're not just about getting everything free. It will be good if it works, but it also works for them if a) no publishers sign up b) no customers sign up (as long as they try hard to make it happen).
- deleted 7y ago[deleted]
- jbverschoor 7y agoYeah nice and all.. But it'll be like tv: Even though you pay for the tv service, after a while they will simply put in ads again. The incentives for publishers are simply too tempting. This is not for me.
- silon42 7y agoPersonally, I don't necessarily mind ads, unless intrusive. I mind: - tracking - javascript being used everywhere (IMO, for pure viewing, javascript should be optional).
- mgbmtl 7y agoThat's why I like Adblock Plus, even if many find their position to be highly controversial. i.e. to charge advertisers to be whitelisted as "acceptable ads" if they respect certain criteria. When left unchecked, advertisers are to websites what kittens are to furniture.
- rglullis 7y agoYou should review your position regarding Adblock Plus. There is nothing on Acceptable Ads that tries to cover if the ad publisher is tracking the user or not.
- heinrichhartman 7y agoI welcome this effort! Enabling alternative revenue streams for web content will be critical to make the place less abusive. 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.
- err4nt 7y agoMozilla's userbase isn't really that significant, <5% is like ~2/50 people, where Chrome for example is 2/3 of all people using the internet by comparison: https://caniuse.com/usage-table https://caniuse.com/usage-table
- r3bl 7y agoThose stats are from StatCounter. Literally the second sentence in their FAQ: > Our tracking code is installed on more than 2 million sites globally. Having a low number there is a feature.
- asadotzler 7y agoMozilla has about 300 million users across desktop and mobile. I'll let you decide if that's significant or not.
- Touche 7y agoThis is sort of unfortunate news to me, as I take this as a sign that they won't do adblocking by default. I think this is a mistake; users want ads to be blocked. Especially on mobile, where it's more important from a perf perspective. Brave has ads blocked, Opera has ads blocked. If Firefox wants to follow the lead and be a privacy focused company like they say, then they need to block ads.
- detritus 7y agoI don't necessarily want ads blocked, especially on sites that I regularly enjoy that I don't pay for with money. 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.
- camgunz 7y agoI'm super into this, and I was tempted to sign up immediately. But then I realized I have privacy/tracking concerns; does anyone have a line on what Scroll/Mozilla say on this? I couldn't find anything after a (very shallow) search.
- fimdomeio 7y agoUnless this is expanded to enable any site to join the system, one might argue it's creating a special web for a few choosen giant media sites which I guess it's not what mozilla wants for the web.
- rchaud 7y agoIt's about time somebody tried this. $5/mo. is fair; I don't need a million sites to be in the catalog, but I would like a bit more variety eventually. 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.
- mavsman 7y agoI am tempted to visit buzzfeednews sometimes but can't bring myself to do it based on my disdain for buzzfeed as a whole.
- quest88 7y agoI believe Google tried something like this and then shut it down.
- d2wa 7y agoContributor was a micro-payments subscription thing were you could buy a subscription and actively participate in the regular ad-exchanges. The idea was that you could support websites by outbidding crappy advertising on Google’s platform and see pictures of cats (or whitespace) instead. It doesn’t take much money to outbid just about every advertising you’d see in a normal month. https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/google-contributor.html https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/google-contributor.html 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.html https://www.ctrl.blog/entry/google-contributor-twopointoh.ht...
- jimktrains2 7y ago> It's about time somebody tried this. 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.
- MrGilbert 7y agoI wonder what an average user generates in terms of ad-revenue per month. You know, the mix of your-favourite-media-provider, your-favourite-news-sites, your-favourite-social-media. 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...
- trqx 7y ago> This app works best with JavaScript enabled. At least the page seems ad-free.
- hereme888 7y agoIf they offer free trials so I can evaluate its worth to me personally, maybe I'd try it. Otherwise I'll keep fighting every website I visit with my massive list of ad-blockers and privacy tools. At least the latter option is free. And if it doesn't remove EVERY clickbait and dark pattern in said sites, I won't do it.
- maccard 7y ago> At least the latter option is free. 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.
- hereme888 7y agoYa I guess my statements were extreme. Probably written late at night.
- OrgNet 7y agoAre you going to get a report each month of where the money went?
- WAHa_06x36 7y agoThat survey they throw at you if you try to sign up is just complete and utter garbage, and asks you questions that both contradict each other, are in the wrong order, and ask you things you can't possibly have a good answer for at this stage.
- juliushuijnk 7y agoAlternative: https://launch.blendle.com https://launch.blendle.com
- matthewfelgate 7y agoScam.
- jimktrains2 7y agoI don't understand why credit card networks (and banks in general) haven't stepped up their game with regards to micropayments (say, under $5). The marginal cost of any transaction is insignificant, and would be outweighed even by penny fees. Even if it required some extra steps for the vendor to become authorized to accept micropayments, and even with strict requirements around the number or total value of transactions a single card can be used with a single vendor during a time period, I think it could still work in everyone's favour. 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.
- petulla 7y agoHear.. hear.. This was one of the original features Marc wanted to add to Mosaic. We're so far past that moment and it's still not to be found.
- buboard 7y agoEverybody is talking about journalists but what about the rest of the web? I regularly read the best opinions and tidbits on forums like hn and blogs. Who is going to fund those?
- nottorp 7y agoThis is a nice idea, but how do you expand it to global scale? Something automated perhaps, but the complexity is overwhelming. 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.
- ekc 7y agoIf only they'd check their pages for typos before posting. (No ending punctuation on the last block of text.)
- carapace 7y ago> This app works best with JavaScript enabled.
- d2wa 7y agoThis won’t do much good for all the small publishers you visit every day, though. It’s only for a select few large publishers.
- d2wa 7y agoIf you’re interested in this, make sure to check out Flattr and install their extension. It tracks your browsing over the course of a month, splits your monthly contribution among participating creators you’ve visited, and then deletes the collected data. Works for YouTube, domains, Twitter, GitHub, Twitch, and more. You set the monthly budget. https://flattr.com/contributors https://flattr.com/contributors