You make a good point. I was actually going to edit my post but for some reason it didn't let me.
If it was a simple case of having something tacked onto my ISP bill, then I'd be far more likely to pay for things. I think that's an area ripe for development. Why ISPs haven't attacked it yet I don't know.
Ad supported is still a pretty good model though and will be around forever. It does depend on who your users are though.
Because ISPs are terrible at picking winning technologies that are worth paying for. If they provided all their users with a search engine 10 years ago, it wouldn't have been google, it would have been some lame competitor.
On the other hand, perhaps they could get together to sort out a standardised payment method that would make paying for stuff online as easy as it is to purchase an iPhone app. No doubt, this would make them loads money and allow many more sites to charge money from their users.
Right. It just needs to be a generic payment system. Much as we had premium rate dial up ISPs for a while to access porn (Apparently).
It could just be a very simple setup:
1. webapp notices you're on ISP A
2. webapp asks ISP A to bill you $3/month
3. you get an email from your ISP asking for authorization
4. you click the link and it's added to your bill
But this falls flat once you remove the assumption that a user only accesses the internet from a single ISP. So what happens when I decide to make that purchase on my lunch break at work? Or from the free wifi at the coffee shop?
There was a time that this would have worked, but I think there are too many people that aren't tied to a single physical location for their internet services. And we haven't all switched to something provided by a cell company.
If it was a simple case of having something tacked onto my ISP bill, then I'd be far more likely to pay for things. I think that's an area ripe for development. Why ISPs haven't attacked it yet I don't know.
Ad supported is still a pretty good model though and will be around forever. It does depend on who your users are though.