Why isn't online money making a solved problem yet?

[andrewducker]

I've been working my way through LARP Trek, and it makes me giggle on a regular basis.

So I was feeling a little guilty about the fact that I block ads from it, because that's the only source of revenue the site had.

So I turned Adblock off for that site. And instantly discovered that the two ads it had were an animated strip across the top and an animated strip down the side.

Now, I'm willing to put up with text-based ads. I'm even willing to put up with static image ads. But when it comes to distracting moving pictures that constantly draw my gaze away from what I'm trying to read? Sorry, you've just made your site unusable to me.

So back on goes ABP, and bang goes any chance of the site making any cash out of my visits. Which is a shame, but I assume they've done the maths and decided they make more money that way.

If only there was a nice standardised system for getting tiny quantities of cash from me to someone else on the internet. That'd be awesome.

Comments

[pseudomonas]

This sort of thing is quite possibly what BitCoin might be non-useless for.

(I tend to block ads cos basically *all* third-party ads are invasive trackers)

[matgb]

I don't use an adblocker, instead I rightclick on any ad that annoys me and block that adserver.

I only do this for ads that annoy me. I rarely see ads these days, as pretty much any adserver in existence has used animated gifs or annoying expanding ads on me at least once.

Far fewer people actually give money than say they will, which is part of the problem. The other side is that any micropayment method doesn't work well internationally...

[marahmarie]

If only there was a nice standardised system for getting tiny quantities of cash from me to someone else on the internet.

I call that system "PayPal". Now if only more sites would use it...I'm not sure how else your actual idea might work, except as an opt-in to automatically deduct say, three cents per page visit based on your personalized cookie, but the backend work to make that possible would be hellacious, I imagine, and would probably open up all kinds of client-side security risks unless patched into near oblivion (not to mention if someone got control of your computer, if they knew you had this deal with certain websites then, even just as a prank, they could keep reloading the page until you simply went broke).