If you had the option to follow a Nostr relay which showed you a few ads per day and paid you sats over LN immediately as it served you an Ad, would you follow the relay?
No, I would not choose a relay that serves ads, however, I might run a client that serves ads and pays me in sats so that I can pay for a relay that accepts sats so long as that relay is doing some content filtering and/or content discovery
To add, a relay that serves ads might filter posts to be "ad friendly" whereas my client serving me ads won't get cancelled or put under pressure to change my viewing behavior and the relay I'm paying to connect to will serve content I want rather than content the ads want.
I would rather prefer the business model of carrot. The people wanting to spend sats promoting a product could by-pass the ad provider and directly pay the user.
No middle man, cheaper for the provider of the product/service and more "free" sats for the consumer.
I clicked depends because, like Twitter, when ads are shown, the incentives are to collect data so that the ads have a higher efficiency of capturing user click-thrus. I mean, Nostr relays probably know less about you than Twitter, but they might know your IP address and they can scan your notes for data and your friend's notes.
Of course, if they don't do that, I would be cool with it. For the time being, advertising Nostr-y & Bitcoin-y services would be a great demographic fit, without the need to collect data, since the majority of Nostr users are Bitcoiners still.
I guess so. What a user submits to relays is intended to be public, so maybe there would be data there you could use. I'd be okay with them knowing my country of origin. I wouldn't want them to partner with anyone else tracking me elsewhere on the internet though. Once you start displaying stuff about me that Google knows, like a location I was recently at, I really think you are cutting into what is enjoyable and charming about Nostr. There are reasons why, because of the demographics attracted to early Nostr use, such ads may be considered more intrusive than the average user may consider them.
I think those are all fair points. Certainly agree that cross site tracking over steps the privacy line.
I like the relay concept because it is opt-in. A good opportunity to agree a transaction between both parties for fair value Attention->Sats. Having agency over the value of my attention and a market demand is interesting– but yeah, ads.
Forgive me if this is a stupid question, but can't I control what I read in my client? I mean to say: the relay XYZ can contain messages which are ads, but since my client is the one fetching them for me, can't my client discard whatever I consider irrelevant, such as the ads?
Or even worse: couldn't I trick the relay by having my client fetch them, but not visually display them for me, thus getting the reward without the annoyance?
Work-around might be a pay-per-click ad model (where you'd have to prove a view) rather than pay-per-impressions where yeah, you could just pretend to have looked at it.
PPC still seems pretty easy to fake by getting your client to just fetch in the background, but not sure how that's any different from the current world of ads, except users don't get paid directly for views. How does Brave handle it?
Yeah, I imagine some type of (or combination of) metrics. Pubkeys who interact with ads more are paid more, pubkeys who interact less or "convert" less are shown less ads/paid less
There are likely numerous ways to exploit a simple version of this, most of which can be mitigated— More so interested in if getting paid sats to see some ads in client is something there is an appetite for
Ads come with strings attached. They often ask to remove other content on the relay. So no.
Nostr relays just need to ask for money, and most people will pay. No ads needed. This is a social network, not an Amway meetup. Not every social gathering has to be about selling products.
this.
I would stop using a relay that inserts ads without consent.
However I could see clients doing revenue sharing with the user and serving high quality ads like carbonads or something.
The relay would only serve ads, you would voluntarily subscribe to it in order to receive ads and be paid. I don't see consent as being much of a problem with that.
The client could work too, but a relay would be cross-client compatible
that's fine. lntxbot could easily publish their sats4ads to a relay and pay out to nostr users lightningaddresses.
but I guess they won't get read receipts. not until we have a NIP for that.
@fiatjaf
I am sure clients will want to generate an income and it could go in different ways, some could use GDN and abmob and enjoy the inventory of world wide bidding that could drive fiat income that they would need to convert, or build their own native lightning based auction that people would use or simply boost their own posts.
that income could be used to run the client and even find ways to reward users
Question: how can a relay, or any other Ad-serving-LN-paying counter-party be sure that I (the user) am not a bot, and not sybil-attacking you by emulating ad views to suck out all your sats?
I believe that all solutions here lead to surveillance, privacy violations, captcha verifications and other crap. Without that, it might work as a toy until people with a little resources find it attractive to attack you.
I certainly don’t currently have fool-proof answer, but I think it would be a combination of economic incentives (ad consumers who perform better are paid more, worse are paid less). Of course the subject of what does “perform” mean and how do we measure it is open for question.
When you start thinking it through, the only way forward is more and more tracking - 'performance', 'are you human', 'show me your passport', etc. There doesn't seem to be any other way.
hmmm..., maybe with a special nostr-show-ads key, different to the usual nostr pk. or even the usual nostr pk. I suggest a signing as proof of humanity, and proof of watching the ad.