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?
Yes38.6%
No40.4%
Depends (comment condition)21.1%
57 votes \ poll ended
pull down to refresh
118 sats \ 6 replies \ @nerd2ninja 12 Jan 2023
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
reply
15 sats \ 0 replies \ @gonzalo 1 Mar 2023
I actually like this idea a lot. You got me thinking about implementing it! :)
reply
0 sats \ 0 replies \ @rijndael 12 Jan 2023
I like this
reply
0 sats \ 3 replies \ @gd OP 12 Jan 2023
Interesting insight!
reply
0 sats \ 2 replies \ @nerd2ninja 12 Jan 2023
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.
reply
16 sats \ 1 reply \ @gd OP 12 Jan 2023
I would suggest that you would want your “content source” relays to be different from the “ad” relay to avoid this.
I imagine the ad relay would only intermittently serve ads, but not necessarily other content.
reply
12 sats \ 0 replies \ @nerd2ninja 12 Jan 2023
Interesting. Alright, an ad relay that pays SATs. I guess that would mean it would work in multiple clients. Maybe this is the right solution.
reply
15 sats \ 1 reply \ @bangbang_u_r_done 12 Jan 2023
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.
reply
0 sats \ 0 replies \ @gd OP 13 Jan 2023
How would product marketers discover users, and vice-versa— how would users find product marketers?
If I have a new product that I want to inform users about, how do I make deals with them when they don't know who I am?
reply
20 sats \ 2 replies \ @nout 12 Jan 2023
I hate ads and I would pay some sats to not see ads...
reply
0 sats \ 0 replies \ @gd OP 13 Jan 2023
I’m grateful that so far, we’re not forced in to viewing ads 🙏🏻
reply
0 sats \ 0 replies \ @gandlaf21 13 Jan 2023
This!
reply
10 sats \ 1 reply \ @ElChair0 12 Jan 2023
It should allow to monetize attention, that is, they should pay the user that is consuming the ads.
reply
0 sats \ 0 replies \ @gd OP 13 Jan 2023
Totally agree!
reply
10 sats \ 3 replies \ @timechain 12 Jan 2023
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.
reply
15 sats \ 2 replies \ @gd OP 12 Jan 2023
Would you be open to that if they paid you increasingly more sats for increasingly targeted ads?
reply
110 sats \ 1 reply \ @timechain 12 Jan 2023
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.
reply
0 sats \ 0 replies \ @gd OP 12 Jan 2023
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.
reply
1 sat \ 3 replies \ @pillar 12 Jan 2023
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?
reply
10 sats \ 1 reply \ @angusp 12 Jan 2023
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?
reply
0 sats \ 0 replies \ @gd OP 12 Jan 2023
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
reply
0 sats \ 0 replies \ @gd OP 12 Jan 2023
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
reply
0 sats \ 1 reply \ @ssats 13 Jan 2023
I would rather pay a few sats to not see ads
reply
0 sats \ 0 replies \ @gd OP 13 Jan 2023
I would rather zero ads for free, with the option to view some and get paid
reply
0 sats \ 1 reply \ @02c142fbe9 13 Jan 2023
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.
reply
0 sats \ 0 replies \ @gd OP 13 Jan 2023
I'd suggest an Ad relay should ONLY serve ads, content should come from other relays to avoid mal-incentives.
reply
0 sats \ 4 replies \ @melvincarvalho 13 Jan 2023
Couldnt you just follow an ad bot?
reply
0 sats \ 0 replies \ @gd OP 13 Jan 2023
As far as I can tell, an ad bot would give a fraction of the functionality for more hassle and less user friendly?
reply
0 sats \ 2 replies \ @zman 13 Jan 2023
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.
reply
0 sats \ 1 reply \ @gd OP 13 Jan 2023
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
reply
0 sats \ 0 replies \ @zman 13 Jan 2023
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
reply
0 sats \ 0 replies \ @TheBTCManual 12 Jan 2023
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
reply
0 sats \ 7 replies \ @brugeman 12 Jan 2023
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.
Is there a solution?
reply
0 sats \ 1 reply \ @gd OP 13 Jan 2023
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.
reply
0 sats \ 0 replies \ @brugeman 13 Jan 2023
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.
reply
0 sats \ 4 replies \ @ElChair0 12 Jan 2023
Brave shows a notification, you click on notification and then the add is shown.
reply
0 sats \ 3 replies \ @brugeman 13 Jan 2023
How does that solve a problem?
reply
0 sats \ 2 replies \ @ElChair0 13 Jan 2023
you could ask for a sign to show ads
reply
0 sats \ 1 reply \ @brugeman 13 Jan 2023
Sign something with my key?
reply
0 sats \ 0 replies \ @ElChair0 13 Jan 2023
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.
reply
0 sats \ 0 replies \ @stellawen84 12 Jan 2023 freebie
It's great