The problem with subscriptions is not the cost, its the sheer number of them - and some come up almost accidentally. I pay a lot to my ISP every month. I would like to see a company that charges me monthly to eliminate all adware by micro-paying the participating websites for my actual page visits. In fact, if my ISP added such a service for a fee, I would sign up.
We tried this - there's a lot of political and business issues that basically mean you can't pull it off unless you're a major player (like Verizon or Google) already. Selling the data (of which one of the uses is advertising) is more lucrative than letting users pay direct, and that's before overcoming the hurdle of most consumers who think that they already pay for "the internet" including all the content.
Google's has the Google Contributor option [1], but that only applies for ads via their ad network and not other potential sources. There's also Flattr which is not as automated but it's now owned by AdBlockPlus crew and has raised rates so it's not such a transparent and clean system anymore.
Forgive me if this is naïve, but how does Joe Random site owner participate in the selling of data? My impression is that that's an area of commerce with a pretty closed membership.
I'm not asking in order to do something like this, just that I think it's an interesting question about exactly who is able to profit from activities that are somewhat assumed to be occurring everywhere, and not by and within the ad networks that everybody is using.
I was talking about the companies that would be in the position to do subscription bundle handling, and they're more interested in the current situation.
Publishers can participate in selling user logins and analytics data through various data companies, they're always interested in more data and especially anything unique that your site adds. You should have a certain scale though for the contract to be worth it, otherwise if its just a personal blog then you're probably just limited to run adding some ads from the typical ad networks.
The only places that buy and sell user data are spammy mailing lists. That's it.
Browser history predicts almost nothing, anyway. There is no market where user data is bought and sold, except for spammy mailing lists to other spammy mailing lists.
There is a vast market for consumer data (which is more than just browsing history) with everything from credit agencies like Equifax to data brokers like Axciom to traditional analytics companies like Nielsen and Comscore to top tech companies like Google, Adobe, Oracle, Salesforce, and others that have marketing clouds with DMP platforms. It's a massive industry.
You want your ISP to [be able to] spy on, and track, your browsing habits? For unencrypted pages, that would probably take the form of DPI and injected javascript. For encrypted (SSL) web traffic, all your ISP has access to are 1) the ip of the website, 2) SNI hostname, if any, in the SSL helo, and 3) how long the TCP stream stays alive, which is probably not representative of your interaction with the site. They have no page-level information.
There's already a service that is probably capable of doing what you ask. It's called google analytics. Google's in the payment business, and google's in the tracking business. If only all publishers could agree to use analytics.js, and petition google to implement micropayments with some agreed upon fee structure.
I am sure there are ways to design such a system that precludes tracking. For example, suppose I have a browser that includes an extension that does this: I want to visit U (some url). My browser sends a request to the no ad service to see if U has signed up. If it has, then it sends me a once-only token. I send this as proof of status to U, and they send it to the no ad service to claim their micro payment. The only parties who know I have visited U are (a) my ISP - I assume all requests probably go through them; (b) the no ad service (actually, all they really know is that I asked for a token); and (c) U, of course - although all U knows is my IP address, nothing else.
Anyway, that is roughly how such a service might work. I am sure that even better safeguards could be designed into it.
> I would like to see a company that charges me monthly to eliminate all adware by micro-paying the participating websites for my actual page visits.
I (and others) am working on this; I call it microsubscription. It's a common idea: I've seen maybe a dozen closely-related variations on it since hitting on it.
In typical techie fashion I became obsessed with the technical problem of preventing publishers from inflating their figures while also preserving user privacy. I solved it, was granted a relevant patent two days ago and I guess we'll see what happens in 2018.
