Mozilla Set To Offer Ad-Free News Consumption Capability on Firefox For $5 Per Month (betanews.com) 94
As previously announced, Mozilla has started to tease the launch of a new $5 monthly subscription to a variety of online news publishers that involves no ads. The idea is that a single, low subscription fee gives you access to a number of sites with the ads removed. From a report: You pay a monthly fee to Mozilla, and this money is shared with its partners to help fund an ad-free internet experience. More than this, Mozilla says that the subscription fee will also grant access to audio versions of articles, article synchronization and more. In a page which promises people the chance to "support the sites you love, avoid the ads you hate", Mozilla says: "We've partnered with some of the world's greatest publishers to bring you a better journalism experience. We share your payment directly with the sites you read. They make more money which means they can bring you great content without needing to distract you with ads just to keep the lights on.
How long will it remain ad free? (Score:5, Insightful)
How long will it remain ad free?
I hesitate to accept ad free as past experience has proven otherwise.
Re: (Score:2, Interesting)
Like cable was supposed to be ad-free. Netflix was supposed to be ad-free but we get hammered over the head with crap before every episode. Hulu and CBS charge extra to be ad free but they still throw ads all over the fucking place, just fewer of them.
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Back in the olden days before acronyms like CATV there was Pay TV it was originally marketed as AD Free (movies and other content).
Then they realized they could make more money than the subscription fees by showing ads and still charge subscription fees!
Now the cable systems are wanting to charge the channels for inclusion to their system access to "their" eyeballs, not the other way around.
The trend I see coming is subscribers to the large systems are dropping off as prices increase and channels are droppe
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No, MTV was 100% ads.
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Same for me on both counts.
I never see ads on Netflix nor do I see ads on Hulu since going to the ad-free plan.
I use a Roku
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Roku v1: no video adds on Netflix or Amazon, although for the past few years I get a picture ad off to the side telling me Season 2 of The Dome is available on Prime.
Roku v4: Autoplaying BS every time you change focus to a new show in the menu on Netflix and on the landing page they get to push whatever 3 star show they want you to watch next. Amazon has ads before your show starts a lot of the time.
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- Hulu has a few shows with ads even in the "Ad free" plan. - I consider the unrequested, noisy trailers at the end of shows in netflix Ads.
- I consider the unrequested trailers at the start of shows in Hulu Ads. Especially the Ads for "premium channels". They are worse than Ads. They are attempts to upsell. (Amazon is the worst about this.) Admittedly I was able to get Hulu to stop those, but I have to call them and talk to a few different people who gave me
Re:How long will it remain ad free? (Score:4, Informative)
Re: How long will it remain ad free? (Score:4, Insightful)
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"How long will it remain ad free?"
Who cares, ads can be blocked.
An ad-blocker and a Cookie deleting button and you're good to go.
The latter is to remove pay barriers, since they just store the number of articles read in there, deleting it will reset it to 0.
Translation (Score:1)
"Pay us this ransom, that we're going to hand off to leftist propaganda rags, or get raped with data tracking and ads."
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Unfortunately, they seem to have a different idea than I do about what constitutes a better browser. I preferred the browser of 5 years ago, and at that point I preferred the browser of 5 years ago. Dicking around with the UI is NOT the way to improve things. Elimination of user options is NOT the way to improve things. Etc. And I'm still not convinced that they're really trying to remove bugs when they do things like removing XUL.
planning-horizon impedance match (Score:3)
I could be talked into this, but only if the news "partners" require three months of public notice to back out, because that's my own planning horizon to back out.
I already have that for free (Score:5, Informative)
It's called NoScript, UBlockOrigin, etc.
It's also called Public Library Online Services
And now will Mozilla block our access? (Score:1)
As you note, we already have ad-free access to sites using Firefox with the help of blocker add-ons of various kinds.
Their new ad-stripped subscription service will place Mozilla in a conflict of interest. Are they going to block these excellent add-ons from working with the sites for which they are charging a subscription? If so then it's bye-bye Firefox.
Re:I already have that for free (Score:4, Interesting)
Ad-blocking does nothing to compensate the content creators & only encourages product placement & sponsored content. I'd far prefer a world where I knew if I was being advertised to.
This is the news equivalent of Netflix/Spotify v PirateBay and I'm all for it!
The big problem with subscription news services is that many people like to get their news from a variety of sources, but paying a subscription for each individual one can become quite costly. This would be a nice way of pooling & redistributing funds, lowering costs for the consumer.
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Fool me once, shame on you (Score:3)
I learned from the first time around that ads that are anything more than basic HTML text or inline images are vectors for attack against my computer systems. As such I've run adblockers of some form or another since they came out.
Until ad companies accept that I will not allow their content beyond basic HTML text and basic inline images, I will continue to run software that blocks ads.
If an ad company chooses to follow this model and only this model then I would be willing to petition the makers of ad-blocking software to make the option for the end user to carve-out this exception. So long as ad companies wish to try to use any other techniques to deliver ads then I will block ads.
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When "basic HTML text and basic inline images" appear below the fold, how can a company estimate how many readers have scrolled to the "basic HTML text and basic inline images"?
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They can do what newspapers did, which is to base prices on circulation, in this case circulation means page-loads.
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Let's say an advertiser shows interest in an ad unit on your website and asks you for the conversion factor from circulation (page loads) to ad views for that ad unit. How would you go about estimating that conversion factor?
But before that, how do smaller publishers find advertisers or vice versa in the first place? To use a newspaper analogy: How would a national advertiser find all the local newspapers in which to advertise? Or how does a newly established newspaper go about finding advertisers?
When most search results are on spam blacklist (Score:2)
I have absolutily no idea. Not my business - literally - nor any intent to make it that.
In order to understand the perspective behind your comment: What industry are you in, if I may ask? Do you have any relatives in the news business?
The moment a company demands that I run (whatever-he-wants-to-dish-out) scripts to solve their problems is the moment I add them to my spam blacklist.
So what do you do once you discover that all or almost all results of a web search that appear relevant are on your spam blacklist, or the majority of featured articles in Slashdot stories are on your spam blacklist?
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There's really no objective news anymore.
Anymore? How naive can you be? Anything that consists for somebody to tell you about an event that you have not witnessed yourself will, necessarily, not be objective. TV news and newspapers have never, ever been objective.
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There can never be objective news. At the most basic level, when a scientist reports on his experiment, he selects from all the things that happened, those things HE considers important. If you thing something else was important, you don't find out.
Now extrapolate from that to someone covering a fire. They will tell you the parts they think will interest you. And editors will pare that down even more.
So even without malicious intent, you will never get objective news. Malice just adds a few other biase
Mozilla is on a roll lately (Score:5, Interesting)
- Firefox got faster, and in the current 'techlash' climate they seem to be embracing being all about privacy again.
- Their mobile OS actually became a hit in India (even though it's not called Firefox OS anymore).
- Their smart home software is already more usable that the open source alternatives.
- Their fun little projects get picked up by the news, like that website where you could mess up profiling by 'bombing' your surf history with lots of fake sites.
- Their mobile Android browser hit beta, and it's.. good. Fast!
- This, which actually sounds interesting to me (YMMV).
Maybe next week we'll hear that got smart and are cancelling their push for WebAssembly.
What GUI for POSIX? (Score:3)
POSIX or the like is also an universal platform.
What graphical user interface API does POSIX specify? I'm not aware of any. The one most commonly used with POSIX, namely X Window System, is supported out of the box on only one of the five major client platforms (Windows, macOS, desktop Linux, iOS, and Android).
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Meanwhile according to StatCounter:
Marketshare: 4.64% (-0.53% YoY)
Desktop: 9.76% (-1.56% YoY)
KaiOS (ex FirefoxOS): 4.39% market share in India
However, Google and Facebook are all over [makeuseof.com] KaiOS as a way to recruit current feature phone users to their services, it's not a privacy oriented OS at all. It's easy to exaggerate the small victories (Munich is switching to Linux, YotLD is here) when they're really just small sparks flickering. Remember that /. is quite OSS friendly, that someone makes a fart here doesn
IT'S TOO MUCH MONEY!!!111 (Score:1)
Ain't nobody got $5 per month for news that is slightly better than word of mouth.
It needs to be pennies. Quit trying to get rich on the equivalent of reddit comments.
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Card processors charge too much to actually pay in pennies. They'll charge a fee starting at $1 for $0.30 just about. If you try to go lower than say $0.50 you'll get $0.01 at best or just plain nothing at worse. It mostly depends on what tier you get processed at. For any would-be competitor to PayPal or Square, it is always much higher than say a grocery store, which is why there's a large fee for both those companies already.
Citation, straight from the horses mouth: https://www.mastercard.us/cont... [mastercard.us]
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You buy digital tokens, and news people can either request donations, or set prices, etc.
Then you get to the problem of each news publisher issuing its own tokens and not accepting those issued by competing publishers.
Economies of scale for home ISPs (Score:2)
I already have an ad free Internet "experience" and I have had this since the 1970's. What do you mean there is ads on the Internet?
My first conclusion from what is that you have been visiting primarily Internet resources maintained by an individual as a hobby or maintained by a nonprofit university as part of its mission. If the Internet were to contract to consist of only hobby sites and uni sites, I doubt there would be enough demand for home Internet access to sustain economies of scale for home broadband ISPs.
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I already don't get ads with Firefox or Chrome. What part do you not get?
The $5/mo subscription skips the "Please disable your ad blocker, tracking blocker, antivirus, etc. to read this website" prompts that you probably have been seeing on news sites.
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I tried to buy a Coke with Bitcoin. An hour and a half later the transaction went through, and by then Bitcoin had appreciated so my Coke cost $4.
LOL, what ads? (Score:1)
"Mozilla Set To Offer Ad-Free News Consumption Capability on Firefox For $5 Per Month "
Lol, I already "consume" news in an ad-free environment thanks to NoScript and Adblock.
Why would I throw away $60 a year for something I already have?
No, it's not a lot of money, but still....why would I do that?
That's the thing about subscription services- taken by themselves one at a time they don't seem like a lot of money, $5 here, $2.99 there, etc etc...but if you take a moment to add up all of the subscription servi
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Why would I throw away $60 a year for something I already have?
Do you "already have" the ability to skip "disable your adblocker" and paywall screens?
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Do you "already have" the ability to skip "disable your adblocker" and paywall screens?
Sometimes. Lots of sites will work just fine in Reader Mode, and if a site really tries to force me to turn off adblocking I usually just bounce out and go elsewhere.
Sometimes I'll run a site through google translate just to be spiteful but rarely is there anything out there that's so valuable to me that I'll turn off adblocking. Once in a while but not very often.
But all that aside, I think you're missing my point about subscription services and how they add up...it's like being nibbled to death. Four or f
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You hit me with an undodgeable paywall or "It looks like you have an adblocker enabled!" overlay, that's an immediate Ctrl+W from me.
When the first several results from a query on a web search engine all do that crap, how many immediate Ctrl+Ws do you perform before giving up?
Could be interesting (Score:1)
Firefox is a Whore! (Score:1)