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> that's on you to come up with an alternative

Ads should be viable here. "The ad ecosystem is broken" is not something individuals should have to fix.

And asking for an entire coffee for a quick tool is not really in line and unlikely to get many takers.

And there's no good way to ask for microdonations.



Google is selling surveillance not ads. Getting a static ad just like a magazine would be the natural fit for such a website.

Bonus question: ads with tracking cost X, ads without cost Y. In actual numbers tell me how much more X is worth. 2Y, 10Y, 100Y? (There are studies on this)


Wouldn't the surveillance work just fine on that site?

Also my memory suggests 3x. But I'll go check.

Top result says 2.6x from ftc.gov but is from last decade.

Another result says "Targeted ads are twice more effective as non-targeted ads, and retargeted display ads encourage 1000 percent more people to search for a product." In response to that, I will note that even if google could not discern the site content at all, that would only affect targeting and not retargeting. So that suggests 2x at most in this situation.


Why "should" ads be viable? Here or in any context?


I'll clarify.

Ads, as long as they have not been banished from the world, should be viable in some form on a small useful site.

There are ideas about how to get rid of ads entirely, but I wanted to be more grounded to the current state of things for the purposes of that comment.


Fair, ads should be viable, but OP really didn't try very hard on that front. There are plenty of ad networks that could be a substitute, but I understand that they're not as good as Google ads, and OP is lazy.

Buy Me a Coffee is not literal, it's a service to collect contributions.

I like the idea of microdonations, and I think it would be healthy for the ecosystem if sites could implement one-click 50 cent paywalls, but that's pretty far off.


> Buy Me a Coffee is not literal, it's a service to collect contributions.

I know it's not literal, but the size and donator effort required makes it a very bad fit for small interactions.


it's a donation

the whole point is to only get donations from people willing to do the effort - with no downsides to others


The point is to get donations from people that are willing to donate. Not people that are willing to put in pointless extra effort.

Extra effort is just a negative. So is needing relatively large donations to overcome transaction fees.


if there was an apple pay button i would have given him a dollar but instead there's "buy me a coffee" which i've never heard of, stripe which im not filling out, and liberapay which iirc is for crypto nerds

i wonder if apple makes it easy to accept money with apple pay (they allow peer to peer payments via apple cash after all)


Stripe also has apple pay these days I believe.


They do. Apple, Google and many other payment options. Plus Stripe Link so you can save your card and pay across many sites now.




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