Would You Pay A Penny Per Page?

nebby writes "How Stuff Works is running an article regarding the "penny per page" model for web site compensation. It sounds like a very viable solution, being simple to understand, transparent to use, and fair to the webmasters and users involved. The only downside to it is that it would require a massive effort on the part of web sites, standards bodies, and/or ISPs to switch over. I know that methods of online payment have been brought up before, but in searching on Google I found no information about any groups or companies looking seriously into moving to this model. I was wondering if any such groups or initiatives have been put together, and if not, why not? :) It doesn't take much to imagine the possibilities of what the web could become if this were put in place ..." Penny-per-page actually sounds like one of the better micropayment ideas I've heard, but is just as vaporous as any of the others so far.

But would we...

Have to pay a penny everytime we get into one of those damned porn sponsored click-fests of opening windows?!

Aggghhh... my credit card bill's high enough already!

;^)

Re:But would we...

The billing mechanism should track for and eliminate charges for that, as well as for pages that auto-refresh themselves, error and non-existant pages, pages arrived at by pressing the back button, duplicate pages and so on."

Alas, not so easy. Even legitimate web site designers have spent the last 6 months figuring out ways to increase their number of pages loaded. Take a look at infoworld.com [infoworld.com]: once one of the most usable technical sites on the web, now a page-hit monstrosity. Yet all of the clicks required to navigate the site are "legitimate", in the sense that they aren't designed solely with the purpose of forcing a click. Deviously, yes, but solely, no.

sPh

Re:But would we...

After having read all the commentary, I get the impression that many people did not bother to read the article. Some of the objections to penny per page websites were addressed in the article -- NEAR IT'S END -- where it appears our dear readers feared to tread.

The whole penny per page notion is based on the FIRST visit to a page.

Objections raised include, but not limited to:
[1] Autoreload pages: No extra charge.
[2] Popups: No charge.
[3] Charge accounting would most likely be done by uour ISP who -already- has your credit into.
[4] Hitting "back" button -- no charge.

So kiddies, go back and read the WHOLE article.

x10.com generates more revenue than Microsoft...

The entire premise of this is absurd. Imagine the annoyance of going to google and searching for the phrase "to be or not to be" and receiving the following reply for your penny:

The word "or" was ignored in your query -- for search results including one term or another, use capitalized "OR" between words.

The following words are very common and were not included in your search: to be to be.

For my penny, I would have a list of "about 236,000,000" web sites that include the word "not." (Doubt me? Try it yourself.)

This is why this idea will fail. When a search goes bad, a web page turns out to be mirroring something seen elsewhere, or a the information is outdated or incorrect, we just move on. But when every one of these extracts a penny from us, we will get rightly angered by it.

Should I pay a penny for each X10 video camera ad that pops up? That would make the owner of that site richer than Bill Gates.

Nobody said that the web had to be profitable -- and no one is forcing site owners to leave unprofitable sites running. I know that I won't pay a penny a page for what is, more often than not, useless material and I think others will share my opinion. Make a site with valuable content and people will subscribe, but don't expect random visitors to just open their coin purse to you on blind faith that you will provide useful content.

What's a page?

With dynamic server-side page generation, how do you determine exactly what a "page" is?

disincentive

Yet at only a penny a page I can't imagine it would be worth their effort to properly index their content.

It actually might be a disincentive to index their content properly, because they get paid for false hits just like they do for real ones. So unscrupulous webmasters would go looking for popular search terms and then try to get their pages to show up on those terms even if they have nothing to do with them. And you thought search engines were bad now!

Re:What's a page?

Especially with search engines in the state they are, I might hit two dozens pages trying to find what I'm really searching for. I have no problem paying for the information I want, but I'd be annoyed at paying for content I don't want simply because they haven't indexed it properly.

As Clay Shirky pointed out [openp2p.com], not to mention the fact that you are adding another thing to think about. Another decision to make every time you reach for an href link.

The web is alredy too costly from a user GUI standpoint in that every link you click wastes about 5 seconds (YMMV) of your life. That's the real reason people hate sites that split their stories up into pages. The last thing that will fly is adding another thing to consider every time you click a link.

The only way it would work is by offsetting all of these "costs" with something. I think only "Damned good content" would work, and since this is the internet we're talking about here, for most sites it simply will not fly.

-pos

Re:What's a page?

Not only that, but what if you hit the back button that goes to a server-side page that was generated on the fly, but you had already visited?

I don't like the idea of paying anying on a per page basis. I pay my ISP already. I don't want to pay for evey page access. I also don't want to pay for those stupid pop-ups!

What about you public computers--such as those cyber cafes? How would you insure that someone else doesn't use your acount information? What about the poor who might not be able to afford these things? There is too many possible problems. This is just another reason for companies to steal more money from consumors.

A navigation nightmare

If people are compensated for the number of pages visited on their site, the current tendency to split information into multiple pages will get much, much worse.

I can just see newspapers with a paragraph per page, or web forums (*cough*) with a comment per page and no option to collapse them.

charge the spammers!

Even if someone _could_ make all service providers switch over (not likely) the odds are that the first adopters would get creamed on this.

As I've said before, charging the spammers a penny per message is a far more viable idea. This ties in with mandatory spam licensing with a federal register of spammers, where people can bill the spammers for traffic.

This kills several birds with one stone.

Pay per view

Pay per view already works quite nicely in some niche markets - specifically, where users don't have any other way of getting access to that specific information.

For any other kind of site, forget it. As long as any sites can still make money with a "free" service, who is going to use one that charges? The only way "penny per page" would become viable would be if everybody did it, and that's not going to happen.

What exactly is a "page"?

Calling this scheme "penny-per-page" makes it sound simple, but the basic problem of defining what it is that the user pays for doesn't go away that easily. What about simple page reloads because of browser hiccups? What about sites like Slashdot, where new content slowly encroaches upon old? What about archives? What about Akamai?

Those aren't new questions, they're the same basic things you encounter as soon as pay-per-anything is considered. I think that complexity makes the subscription model (Salon) more appealing from a management and marketing standpoint, because it's easy to describe and appreciate the value proposition.

Caching...

I'm not down with web servers and ISP's but I would think it would be good for an ISP to cache common url's that people goto (i.e. msn.com for people that don't know how to change their default start page). So if my ISP is caching msn.com and I go to msn.com but never use msn's web servers then who gets the money? My ISP or msn? MSN made the page but my ISP is "hosting" the page.

That's REALLY expensive

I don't know if i'm a typical net surfer, but i imagine I go through probably 500 or more page views a day. That's probably on the high side.... let's say it were just 200.... that's 2 dollars a day. Doesn't sound like much, but in a month that's $60 bucks. That may not sound like much, but think... if your dial-up ISP charged that much, you'd tell them to piss off. If your cable ISP charged that much, it would be on the pricey side (though not entirely unreasonable) now if this price were on top of ISP fees... well, that makes it difficult for the working underclasses (me included) to afford being on the net.

Hell no on that idea!

Re:That's REALLY expensive

I have to say that I agree on that matter. Not to mention, who is going to do the administrative overhead of figuring out who to charge for what page access and where to send the bill. A hundred seperate 5 cent charges to a credit card? Yeah right, it costs the businesses more than that to place a credit card charge, which is why most places won't accept credit cards unless you spend 5-10 dollars. And if there's a central agency they're going to want their cut. I think the whole idea stinks.

And don't even go down the road of how I could spoof a frame from a large company to my own website, showing that I have a request a second from say, GE or something. The potential for dishonesty is just as frightening. And then where do you go to dispute charges, and are you willing to dispute 10 or so of these to a largely ineffectual body every single month? I didn't think so.

Re:That's REALLY expensive

Probably the easiest way to implement a flat-rate model would be to create a cap. Let's say that the monthly cap were $20 per month. Everyone would know that if they looked at more than 2,000 pages per month, they would pay no more than $20 per month.

This is not implementable - if it were implemented, people would clearly just run proxies to pool everybody's requests through a single machine (not to mention that it is impossible to enforce a single machine per identity to begin with without going for sinister methods).

This is typical of the sort of, not just technically, but logically flawed ideas that always come out of these pointless pipedreams not motivated by reality but what people NEED or DESERVE. If any solutions to the actual problems are to come around, then they need to start with the realities of cyberspace, which the penny-per-page idea clearly does not.

The first reality of cyberspace is that you do not pay for information. Information, once created, can be copied infinitely, so generally available copies have no value - regardless of the emotionally motivated arguments about what creaters NEED or DESERVE. If one is working on a solution for getting people to pay for information online, then one can be sure one's solution is broken.

The second reality is that there is no possible mapping between identity in cyberspace and identity in real life. A single person can be present as a hundred identities, and single identity can represent a hundred people. Any sort of model that includes ideas about any action "per person" is doomed, as is any model that gives an identity negative trust (that is one where an identity can be treated worse then a previously unknown one).

The third reality is that all information is equal. If a model measures information in any other unit then bits it is stupid - because one off units like "pages" mean nothing about the actual contents or the the cost of transfer. It is short sited and ends up relying on user hostile (read evil) software to enforce that "page" means the accepted norm.

However, that is not to say that the problems facing the web are not real. It did not bother me when pages paying millions for content creation folded - paying for content creation hoping to control the information is stupid, so those pages (like the music and film industries) deserved to fall. However, what we are seeing now is the Web reaching the point where pages like this one are folding under their own popularity - because even though they have no costs for creating the content, they are unable to pay for the service of providing the page - that is a real problem.

Everybody who has ever sent an SMS (cell phone short message) or made a local call in Europe knows about overcharging networks. The costs are set not by the actual costs of transfer, but rather by what the companies controlling the networks (usually oligopolies) find they are able to charge people. That is ridiculous and destructive - but it seems that the Internet is the opposite - an undercharging network.

The simple truth is that we should be paying when we visit a website - not for the content - you DO NOT pay for content - but for the cost of transfer. It is unfair and unrealistic that a large part of the cost of transfer should fall on the publisher, rather than the person who benefits from the transfer.

Systems that do not reflect economic realities are dangerous. While the idea of paying a charge on every single IP package routed sounds like a nightmare to many Internet anarchists - the truth is that the fact that we are not paying is gearing up to be a real threat to free speech online since community run services are seizing to be sustainable. The price should be fair, and much lower than then the penny-per-page proposed above, at least for most definitions of "page" (server transfer costs seem between $.001 and $.01 per Megabyte at the moment) - but I fear for the future of the Web, and the net at large, if it does not come about.

Eastern Europe Perspective

I live in Eastern Europe. My income is about $400 per month which is above average in this country. I have a university degree and am not stupid or lazy. I just live in a poor part of world. I cannot afford to buy any western books or subscribe to any magazines. Web is the only source of information that I have. Web completely changed my world because giving me information freely. I am extremely afraid that someday such scheme will be adopted.

No.

No. I wouldn't pay a penny per page so long as similar material was out there for free. And I would go out of my way to look for free material under a penny-a-page payment model.

Call me a pessimist, but my belief is that businesses are incapable of handling this kind of thing responsibly. The moment we go to penny-per-page, we'll start to see things artificially segmented across a dozen pages, and all kind of fluff and noise between the front page and any useful pages.

Make it a penny/nickel/dime a day for access to a whole domain, depending on the quantity and nature of the content within, and I might be interested.

Re:No.

Make it a penny/nickel/dime a day for access to a whole domain, depending on the quantity and nature of the content within, and I might be interested

I agree with your points about how companies would segment articles to make you pay more, but at the same time, I don't think this idea would work either. What if you're mirroring an FTP site - should you pay $0.05 for sucking down 4GB of data in a day while the loser who just wanted to buy a t-shirt from the online site pays the same?

Also the larger problem is that both of these ideas, (yours and the penny-per-page thing) are too web/HTML centric. Is a 5MB shockwave file a page? 10 pages? What about mirroring an FTP site? What about embedded audio in a page? What about downloading trial software?

My guess is that if any micropayment system is put in place, a lot of content will start to migrate away from the web to other formats. (NNTP, Gopher, FTP, whatever - just something free as in beer) After all, Web != Internet

Sure

Sure, it sounds great. But the minute some company actually goes and does this, there will be a hue and cry from this and other quarters. "Information wants to be free" , will be the battle cry. A rash of projects to mirror, deliver fee-free, and thereby rip-off the content and intellectual property of these sites will be started, and any efforts to stifle them will be ridiculed and railed against. Companies will sue sites like Slashdot, which even now, in a fee-free world, routinely have users posting verbatim copies of the content which these companies hope to sell, and there will be outrage at this.

All micropayment and other schemes where people have to pay for something for content sound great until they really happen. Then we'll see how really honest people are. If music serves as any example, I for one am not optimistic.

Penny-a-page equals bye bye Google?

What does penny-a-page do to spider searches?

It would be too costly for Google and friends to index a site which demanded a penny for each page read.

One problem, and a quote...

It's also not going to add up to very much per month. People who log on to check stock prices, look up the weather, read the top news stories and so on might look at 25 or 50 pages a day. They would pay something between $5 and $15 per month for Web content. But let's also take the worst case scenario. Let's say that you sat in front of your computer 8 hours a day and looked at a new page every two minutes without interruption 20 days per month. That would cost $48 for the month. That is the worst case scenario, and it is unlikely anyone is going to do that. The cost will be minimal for just about everyone

I just popped through 6 pages in about a minute and a half reading/skimming this article. One page every two minutes? Do people actually read that slowly?

If I'm looking for something, I tend to have two or three browsers open... usually one on Deja that does near constant Usenet searches. Their estimation is about 240 page views per day. Heck, I can almost kill that just on Slashdot within the course of a day.

Won't work

If I was charged a penny a page for a physical medium item like a newspaper or magazine, I know that 1) there would be no physical problems in delivering that page to me and 2) I can use that page over and over again.

In the internet medium, what happens if the routing decides to go south while that page was being delivered, requiring me to reload? What happens if I click a link on that page that took me to some place off site to read more about something, then when going back, the browser was forced to re-request the site again? What if I want to use that page as a reference, bookmarking, but being charged a penny ever time I accessed it?

(Yes, there's ways to bookkeep around all these problems, but I doubt that most sites would figure out all the right nuances).

There's just too many technical problems that can happen that a pay-per-page scheme can work. Instead, if those sites that cannot continue to fund themselves on banner ads should either look into 1) getting a better targetted banner ad provider, just as how /. has done, which will have a much better click-thru rate for your site, or 2) adopt a pay-per-term such as Salon has done for premium content. In the latter case, if your content is that good, you'll thrive (as I understand it, Salon's Premium is doing well, given their good content to start with), but otherwise, you'll flounder (and maybe for good reason).

And in the end, while I don't do it know, a web site with content and delivery like Salon would be worth about the same price as a magazine subscription for a year (eg $30-$40/yr) as long as it's unlimited access to the site.

OK, may not sound like much but....

Take me for example. All thse numbers are being extremely conservative for me.

I'll say I surf an average of 2 hours per day. Thats 120 minutes per day, or 7200 minutes. Now, assume I spend around 30 seconds ona web page before clicking a link to view another (This is a VERY high estimate for me). Thats around 240 page views per day, or $2.40 by this "penny per page" scheme. Thats 72 dollars per month, in addition to my 45 dollars per month for my DSL connection.

And this is being conervative! I can easily name days where I spent upwards of 8 hours online, roughly half of which was viewing web pages. This is much too expensive, I'd never go for it. Maybe 0.25 cents per page is more reasonable.

Holy Privacy Issues Batman!

Can you imagine how much invasion of privacy this would entail. They would have to track every page each user went to. The monetary issue aside, this is dead in the water as far as I'm concerned. The implementation of this would be a nightmare.

Cripples universal access

Correct me if I'm wrong, but isn't one of the great things about the web the way that information can get all around the globe quickly? Paying a penny a page would be irritating for most of us in the western world, but it could effectively close off huge sections of the web to citizens of developing countries. Say you "normally" view 5 pages a day on each of 4 or 5 sites - if you're living on $5 a day, are you really going to pay 5% of your income to view US news sites, UK informations sites, etc?

This is stupid

I'm sorry, I appreciate the fact that someone has to come up with ideas, and I'm not loaded with alternatives, other than leave it free. But Penny-Per-Page?! It just wouldn't work. For one thing, you might see Slashdot suddenly limit the number of comments per page to 10, or google will only let you see 5 results at a time. "Oh, you want search item #100, that will cost you $.20." For example, the article could have easily been in one page, but HowStuffWorks breaks their stories up to increase banner hits. Don't you think everyone would do that if they got a guaranteed penny per page?

There are just too many ways for this program to be abused. For instance, the author says we could create a cap of $20 a month. Well, guess who's site I'm going to hit 2000 times on the the first day of each month. MINE! This is not to mention the amount of tracking that would have to be implemented to do this. Maybe we could just let the FBI send us a bill since they will soon know where we've been anyway.

The only way to make a micropayment plan work is to make it voluntary and give a reward to those who pay other than just the content. Sure you will have freeloaders, but the people who are your return customers will probably pay to keep you around, and if they don't, let them eat banner ads.

How did this get posted?

I was very interested in seeing how anyone would come up with a Micropayment proposal that would have all the problems of previous proposals, well if you havent read the article don't bother there's nothing of worth in it.

90% of the article is basically gushing about how cool it would be if somehow a penny-per-page was somehow magically implemented. Details of how this should be implemented and why this hasn't come to pass yet if it is such a good idea are simply ignored. Halfway through reading it I saw so many errors with the logic but kept reading hoping that the answers would show up later in the article but was sorely dissappointed.

Here's my list of questions that weren't answered in the article:

1. How exactly will websites bill you a penny per page? Who will handle transactions so small because credit card companies and banks don't seem interested.
   
   
2. What about frequently visited sites? Slashdot probably generates a hundred pages a day for me considering I check it every hour, read comments and check my user history for replies to my comments. Between Yahoo! Mail, Yahoo! Finance and Yahoo! News there are probably another hundred hits. Using a penny-a-day I'm paying 2 websites $30 a month.
   
   
3. How will a person's web usage be metered for billing all across the internet without some sort of extensive and intrusive user monitoring?
   
   
4. A penny per page would be expensive for people in third world countries?
   
   
5. How exactly are people who browse from internet kiosks or libraries supposed to be billed? Are websites supposed to now have front pages that lock you out until you enter your credit card number or must everyone who uses the 'net sign up with a central authority before being able to browse the web?
   
   
6. How exactly do they expect the top 1000 websites to form a coalition?
   

This article was simply a pile of wishful thinking that didn't get past the "ask my friends if this is a good idea" stage before getting posted to the web, what is sad is that it actually made it's way to Slashdot which unfortunately now gives it some credibility. I wonder if any VCs going to end up flushing a few millions down the drain after this idea simply because it ended up on Slashdot.

All the web is supposed to be good for is money?