Ads are the lazy way to monetise anything. I love Duolingo's example, where they've built out a translation service on top of their language-learning platform: while learning a new language, people contributed to the translations Duolingo could sell to their clients.
I bet they make %% more than by running any amount of ads.
> Talk to Google/Facebook about that. Maybe you think subscription is better way for...search?
Google gets to crawl all the web for free for its search results. Maybe Google should start paying websites for crawling them hey ? Of course if you crawl google search you're now violating their TOS ... how does google make money again ? Ad networks like Google ( because that's what Google is ) can't have it both ways.
Ads can be also a way to monetise something that doesn't reach the value threshold where people will pay directly.
E.g. Niche blogs sometimes have a lot of visitors (they are providing some value) but not enough to get paid directly. Even patreon most times doesn't work.
I disagree. The best monetized site I've seen had a direct relationship with the advertiser, no ad blocking as the banners were local content, spot on topic and tasteful.
When ads are served locally, avoid tracking, remain kept out of the way and are kept strictly within the topic of the content - then we are talking about a reasonable starting point.
Unfortunately the current ad ecosystem seems to be diametrically opposed to this. As far as I can see, the ad vendors brought this situation upon themselves.
Those deals require business development / sales to happen, which requires time and/or money. Those are expenses that many sites can't afford. Slapping on SSP tags, on the other hand, is cheap and starts bringing in money right away.
Now added (with tweaks to fit the static-site generator and templates I'm using.) I love the idea of turning the functionality of adblock-detection on its head.
To my mind, ads are, in the absence of my prior informed consent, an outright theft of the computing and networking resources I pay for. (Not to mention the attention thing and the propaganda/pernicious-psychology things.)
I could not agree more: There are NO acceptable ads.
Brushing over the core issue as if someone else is certainly going to solve it in a timely fashion through sheer pressure in a way that is going to turn out preferable to advertisement.
Most companies charge people money for goods or services they value and gladly pay for. For them ads are an adjunct to marketing, not a business model. Some other people host stuff for free, some sell content slots (like the job ads here on HN), some give content away to attract other business. That diversity is great, and none of it is threatened by ad blockers. There's more to the world than ads, a lot more.
In contrast the rise of ad companies like taboola is actively degrading content and experiences and debasing previously respected sites. If you insist on showing intrusive advertising, users will go elsewhere. The failure of that business model based on ads is simply not the reader's problem to solve.
7) you doing an MTurk-like task for every site you visit once per day (or per 6h), with an option to bypass by paying a subscription. Payment for the task goes to the site. Cloudflare already has the necessary infrastructure (requires Tor users to do Captchas, for example)...
Number ② might actually be feasible if micro payments can be implemented in a sensible manner. That is something I would like to see, but it seems hard to get right.
An option missing from your list is sites providing free access to the first few articles in order to generate interest in their paid offerings. Newspapers sometimes do this; on their own sites and at aggregate services providing paid access to the articles from several newspapers and magazines.
Number two is the obvious answer. There are several alternative models being explored involving micro-payments or revenue share. Two off the top of my head:
- Brave browser, blocks/replaces all ads by default, ran by one of the founders of Mozilla
I find discussions on HN about advertising very amusing. If advertising would magically disappear tomorrow, most of the people visiting this site would be jobless.
That's what I keep saying also (at expense of some downvotes).
As most people, I don't like ads. But this is capitalism, a system fueled by consumption. Without changing the system, ads will never disapeer, they will always come back with a different form, they are a necessary 'evil'.
[edit/disclaimer] I don't work on ads, I only curate a niche blog.
if this discussion makes people who work in jobs dependent on ads to reflect on their choices then so this goes the initial step towards a change, even if it's a change in career from digital marketing to a technology company.
One of the problems with pure capitalism is that it favours those that are buying. i.e. those with money. The direction of progress under a capitalist system is governed by the desires of the wealth-holders (whether that is millionaires, the middle class, or some other cross-section of society), not humanity as a whole.
That would be a lot more powerful argument if capitalism didn't so readily churn out ever-cheaper (ie, directed at the poor) offerings of, well, everything. Walmart and Spirit Airlines (to pick a few out of many such offerings) aren't exactly pandering to the rich.
Anyway, this was not the point the GP made, and thus not what I responded to.
That's not a counter argument - cheap products exist because there is a market for it (whether the market demographic is rich or poor, it doesn't matter). It still hinges on the exchange of money to decide what should be produced. It's far from perfect, but it does seem to have a blurry correlation with what humanity needs (in my opinion).
I guess it's not a counter argument as much as disagreeing with the premise. If the outcome is good (a wide range of products available to the poor) then why declare the mechanism by which it happens (exchange of money) problematic? At least, let's focus on concrete problems.
The problem with declaring something "far from perfect" is deciding what perfect looks like. The fact that even the poor has a Walmart-sized vote in what gets produced looks like a pretty strong vindication of the system to me. Sure, there are always areas that can be improved, I'm not declaring the current state of things perfect, but I'm appealing to a focus on specific, practical improvement, rather than a yearning for an abstract perfect state that epistemologically probably can't be known.
Consumption is necessary (as a mean) in all systems but it's not fomented as it is in capitalism. In advanced capitalistic societies comsumption exists mostly to feed the system and this over consumption doesn't seem to correlate to extra life quality.
If not consumption as the final purchase of goods and services by individuals is the goal (not a mean), then what is the goal?
Since the system is made of people producing goods and services for other people to enjoy (consume) what is the problem with feeding the system itself?
Absolutely, some sorts of production are destructive in excess of the consumption value of the goods produced, but most certainly aren't, so I don't see how that indictes the system as a whole.
In my opinion the goal should be the well-being of society and consumption should be just a mean to achieve it. After some level, consumption doesn't seem to correlate with well-being, becoming just a waste of resources that could be allocated more efficiently having in mind this optimization towards the well-being of society.
The problem, IMHO, happens when we don't 'fuel' the capitalistic 'society engine' with more and more consumption, strange things seem to happen: the 'engine' stiffs.
Yeah, I would more or less agree with "people in general don't want to pay for content that they can easily and legally get for free with non-obtrusive ads."
Why would we need to do that? If Google (and all of its advertising-based competitors) disappeared tomorrow, something like YaCy[0] would take over. So many business models that exist today based on advertising and central hosting could be replaced by decentralized, peer-to-peer, free software projects. The main thing limiting these projects right now is lack of interest due to the non-profit property.
Of course, there is also the possibility that the actual market value of a lot off "content" is zero. In those cases, deriving your revenue from advertising distorts the market.
He accentuates some research as the be-all, end-all authority on the matter. Of course it is a valid argument to point out that a study can be fabricated to give arbitrary conclusions.
I don't think its a fallacious viewpoint... although you are right that there are few alternative options in this case.
Generally people want to get the best value for their money - free things are the positive extreme of good value for money... and whilst people will pay more for something that is better than the free version, this is often a very small proportion of those who will use a free version. at least based on my real world experiences from working on apps that have both free and paid versions...
away from the extreme this logic is obviously faulty though. i've seen many cases where /raising/ a price increases the volume sold... which completely baffles me.
"If advertising would magically disappear tomorrow, most of the people visiting this site would be jobless" but really this is just a silly presumption with absolutely no evidence.
I find them amusing because you get a hardcore of geeks thinking how they view the world (and advertising) as being the Right Way™ and that the general public secretly shares their opinions, even thought they don't.
It's on the same level of idiocy as thinking all the "brightest minds" are in tech or working in Silicon Valley, "print is dead", or that social media doesn't matter.
I no longer visit websites that block people who block ads. Not out of spite, but because the content they produce is of such low value that I have no incentive to pay for it if offered (either with money, or with my attention for your ad supplier). And this is my contention with 99% of content produced on the internet in general.
Could we move beyond adblocking and start blocking such sites directly? I don't want to even visit websites that only grab content from other sites. From bots making nonsense pages for getting in your search results to news sites grabbing a story from another news site and rewriting. I've seen plenty of sites that just copy Wikipedia or StackOverflow content to show it with ads and with no added value on top.
In theory, Google should be penalizing these sites left and right, however, since many of them appear to slip through the cracks, this would indicate that the problem is much more difficult to solve than it seems.
Can someone explain how Google makes so much money with their ad system and how its related to these kinds of ads? Google originally planned never to do ads. They changed course I think 2002 or so, and are now worth 500B$.
I'd venture to guess: no looping GIF ? No video ads with auto-play ? That's why I use an ad-blocker. I didn't care about static images/text but animation prevented from reading the actual content. I am sure I am not the only one.
Through mail, search, youtube, android they control a huge amount of traffic. They also have a clever bids system for ads which encourages people to spend lots and gives them enough tracking to let them feel it's worth it. Mostly it's just the traffic though.
It's at the opposite end of the spectrum from taboola say, and is probably the most acceptable form of advertising I've seen. So both customers and advertisers like it.
Google is very unique. They get half of the ad market because they power search for so many people.
Advertising is about matching up your intent with what the advertiser is selling, and there's no clearer signal of this than what you type into a search bar because you're letting Google know exactly what you're looking for at that moment.
While Google does have a big ad network for banners and text ads across the web, their search ads are very well targeted by your search queries in addition to all the profile information they have about you. This gives them an amazing ad platform that works very well for pretty much all of their clients.
The only other company that comes close today is Facebook which works by mining all the data that is shared and estimating intent through your likes, updates and interactions.
I've used Adblock, Adblock Plus, Noscript and Ghostery. Since several months I've changed to Privacy Badger. The first time I tried it, I thought it didn't work, but it seems it needs a little time to collect info and start blocking. Since then I've had no issues with it. It's easy to unblock individual sites, if something doesn't work, and then re-blocking it again.
The only problem is that when I want to unblock one specific functionality on a website, it's very difficult to find out which scripts to allow. At first you see the PB has four items blocked. Easy you think, you can try four times, and then it should work. But those four items load another twenty, and then it gets complicated. This is not Privacy Badger's fault, just the complexity of websites nowadays. But if you could allow specific services, instead of specific scripts, that would be great.
I can't give a useful review, nothing more than that it works for me like Adblock and Ghostery have worked.
Intrusive ads are not some new phenomenon. Print, radio, and TV ads are all definitely intrusive as well. I don't generally hear the same crowd advocating the end of all such advertising.
Indeed, using an ad blocker isnt new either. Most people always channel-surfed or muted the car radio or TV when ads come on. The only difference now is that advertisers can tell you didn't see their ad.
They're intrusive but they aren't violating your privacy, tracking you and/or being a potential security threat. That aside, there's also no way to remove those ads.
I want high quality content, and I'm willing to pay for it. Wired recently starting blocking ad-blockers, with an offer of $4/month for access. I decided it was time to start putting my money where my mouth is.
I'm tired of low quality content, I want to be supporting serious, intelligent journalism that goes a bit further than the click-bait we're stuck with at the moment. Even the content traditional newspapers are putting out online has become vapid, they need to start shooting for the standards they used to and become comfortable with charging for it.
I've got £50/month waiting for quality content. Maybe not everyone does? But then again plenty of people were happy/able to pay for their daily newspaper. It feels like there's a gaping hole in the market at the moment, I'm hopeful that we're seeing the start of the return to journalism.
I pay for a lot of content, but individual subscriptions doesn't scale. I have subscriptions to Stratfor, The Economist and NYT. Nothing else has enough for me to buy in bulk. I would probably pay for 538 too.
There are Wired articles I would pay to read, but I don't want the whole corpus.
Any idea how to encourage quality content with micropayments? The naive implementation would be to charge on opening the article, but I suspect that would just encourage more click-bait headlines. Short articles can still contain good content, so just tracking reading time wouldn't be sufficient either.
Being in the content game, it's because it's totally not worth littering pages for the 5 cents a month it'd make.
I'm hyperbolizing, but even if it were $100/month, it wouldn't be worth the space. What this space needs is someone with deep pockets to subsidize the publisher growth until the critical mass of users is reached.
Micropayments have been the obvious - to me - solution for this problem since I got on the internet in 1997. Still never seen it employed anywhere. Yes, heard of flattr. Never seen a single site that uses it.
For the Bitcoiners, there's the nano-paywall from https://satoshipay.io/ . (I'm part of the team working on this). We're currently trying to integrate fiat payments too, which would make this a browser wallet of sorts that can be used to pay micro-amounts to publishers. Still early days, but think we're on to something with a lot of potential.
I know I must be missing something here, but what is actually preventing a service where a number on your account (which you have funded with $10, because lots of quality news and content sites are signed up to it) decreases by 00.10 and someone else's number (whose article you just paid to read) increases by 00.10?
One the face of it, this seems like the easiest thing in the world to accomplish, particularly for already established, trusted and extensively used payment-related companies like Paypal.
Did they really earn $4 a month per user when they used ads? I guess they raised the price a lot because they realised they would lose lots of people. One way to lose lots of people is to immediatly start with a high price.
It's going to be hard to get people back once they left.
Yes, there is lots of room for innovation. Too bad the big media companies have no feeling of need for innovation.
They lobby for laws against adblockers. They look to blame the customer and the ability of the customer to block their ads.
Consider theguardian.com, you can become a supporting member for €49/yr (probably $49 in the US), even though you can freely access the content without paying.
The Guardian is still heavily dependent on advertising and turning more and more to shady native advertising deals. They took oil money for example at the same time as they were running a 'keep it in the ground' campaign. Media Lens have a good piece on The Guardian here: http://www.medialens.org/index.php/alerts/alert-archive/2016...
An increasing number of Guardian pieces seem to be thinly-disguised advertorials.
When Adele's last album arrived it ran pieces about the awesomeness of Adele for days without a break, until it became a running joke in the comments.
Of course it's impossible to prove the content was bought and paid for, but unless the editor is the biggest Adele fan in the world in the history of ever it's hard to imagine the staff at an international daily spontaneously filing Adele puff pieces without prompting.
It would be interesting to have a convergence of apps, community, shopping, and content. A lot of niches benefit from all those things but are separated across different platforms. Packing that together could make the combination feel like a premium product and justify a monthly payment (or gift subscription). It also requires less effort from the user to discover the various elements.
Monetization of content is a business opportunity waiting to happen. Something like a network where you put, I dunno $10 per month and every article you read is charged for $0.10, as an example. Or unlimited during the month for $1
If news sites can allow us to Tweet or Fb an article it might be possible to 'coin' an article as well in a seamless manner
I like the concept of micro payments, but I am worried about the notion of a single large party providing this service. Can you imagine the worth of all those user profiles correlating topics, interests, articles, and websites?
Payment would have to be anonymous for this to work.
There was so little high quality, original content even in the old days. It was mostly opinions, simplifications of scientific papers, excerpts from press releases and press conferences, or something someone (usually not a journalist) caught on camera.
With the communications technology we have now, it's hard for anyone to add significant value in the middle between the source of the news (scientists, inventors, politicians, entertainers, witnesses, etc.) and the public.
For example, 25 years ago the media spent a lot of airtime and ink on the beating of Rodney King, and indeed we only heard about it thanks to the media. Now, we can watch similar videos on YouTube, read court documents and the police departments' press releases directly, and hear thousands of diverse opinions on social media. That role of the old media is obsolete.
But I'd still pay for accurate, unbiased investigative journalism.
"With Brave, you can choose whether to see ads that respect your privacy or pay sites directly. Either way, you can feel good about helping fund content creators."
So you could choose the ad-free option and have Brave pay the sites you visit.
>I'm tired of low quality content, I want to be supporting serious, intelligent journalism that goes a bit further than the click-bait we're stuck with at the moment.
The thing is, historically speaking this kind of content has been free. The goal of the world wide web was to provide people with the ability to publish for themselves, and it was a smash hit success because it turned out that when you give people the ability to publish their work, they may only write two things in their entire life but they care so much about those things they're a lot higher quality than what you get out of forbes today.
With a whole internet full of people only writing (or filming, or recording, or coding, or whatever) one or two things, there's a world of fantastic content out there. Lots of it is in old forums, some of it has been monitized by ads (youtube), but most of it is still free as the authors intended.
But then the notion of earning an income on ads came along, and with it came the concept of clickbait. Quality took a dive and formerly free content got jailed up behind paywalls or plastered with ads. The amazing conceit was that the people who did this think because they did the work, they deserve to get paid. It never crosses their mind that we might wish they hadn't done the work in the first place.
The honest truth is, I'm tired of low quality content too, so I'm blocking ads to try and kill of the companies making it.
> But then the notion of earning an income on ads came along
That's unfair, and almost flat out wrong. Content and ads pretty much evolved hand in hand. Sure, there was some content up before ads came along, but ads came up almost immediately after. There was also practically no content on the 'net compared to today. The net back then was... almost non-existent. It was a ghost town. You had sites like prodigy and compuserve hosting a large chunk of the 'net and they did have ads. This was in the mid 90s.
I've been online since 1994, and that's not how I remember it.
There was plenty of amateur content put up for fun before the ad explosion. There were search engines for the content. And there was a lot of academic and technical information.
Then the business types moved and tried to turn the entire web into a strip mall. To some extent they succeeded. Twitchy pointless banners invaded a lot of pages.
To a large extent they failed, because the purveyors of twitchy little banners pretended they have the same user impact as print and TV advertising - and that idea has always been demonstrably wrong.
The problem is that the twitchy little banners created an entire economy of user sharking, which completely fails to understand that the best ads give real value to users - either by providing truly useful leads, or by being beautiful and interesting. Networked web ads are none of the above.
Occasionally you'll see sites that sell space to a narrow targeted niche relevant to readers of those pages. Those tend to do much better.
But the scatter-shot nature of web advertising puts it on the same level as email spam. It's not useful, it's not interesting, it's not beautiful, it's just distracting and annoying. Most of it provides no user benefit at all.
It deserves to die until that changes. If it can't exist without being parasitic on content, then the market needs to kill it off until it works out how to pays its way.
And the content industry needs to get over itself and start producing outstanding, irreplaceable, content that readers genuinely want to pay for. If it can't do that, it needs to die out too.
Ads have been funding content for centuries, and that includes newspapers, magazines, radio and TV. In most cases, people have never had to pay the full cost of producing the content they consume, which may well have resulted in them undervaluing content across the board.
When commercial content providers (newspapers, magazines, radio and TV etc) moved on to the web, they naturally brought their ad-funded business model along with them.
> " In most cases, people have never had to pay the full cost of producing the content they consume"
That's debatable. It's worth remembering that before the Internet, many traditional forms of media had multiple income streams, of which advertising was only one. Would it have been possible to produce TV and radio content based on a subscription-only model? Seemed to have worked out fine for the BBC. Newspapers and magazines would have taken a hit, but if revenue was based on sales alone then it's certainly possible some of those institutions could have survived on this.
In other words, it's not a case of working with zero money it's a case of working with less money.
Sky encrypts its content, and its subscriptions are certainly enforced by the whole legal system. Try forging some Sky cards or even using a personal account in a public setting, such as a pub, and you may well find out....
You're missing the point. The point is that it's possible to deliver subscription-type models for broadcast media without needing close ties with the state. Public broadcasters like the BBC could use the same type of encryption as Sky, for example.
> "The BBC has police to enforce its subscriptions - a model not easily reproduced by private companies."
If you're going to reply, at least consider the context in which the comments were made. The original point I was responding to was that subscription models only work in state supported media outlets. My assertion was that Sky proves that subscription models are possible outside those restraints.
Furthermore, even if there was a case where a company was not supported by the law, subscription models can still exist. There are examples online of subscription services for illegal content. One could argue that Usenet subscriptions in the broadband era fall into this category, the chances that people are currently paying a monthly fee to access the discussions is somewhat slim.
Newspapers and magazines, for example, had multiple income streams, but as the cost of printing newspapers climbed, an increasing percentage of the cost shifted onto advertising. Many reached the point where it made more sense to give the product away free, so advertising paid for 100%.
Subscriptions can work, but usually that's only for small quantities of high-value content, aimed at specialist audiences.
Go to your local stationer and find out how much it would cost for 200-300 sheets of high quality paper, then ask a printer about the cost of printing content on them.
> I want high quality content, and I'm willing to pay for it.
Now if only the other billions of people on this planet felt the same way.
That's why I don't like this sentence. Every time the topic of ads come up here or on reddit, people always say "I'd pay for high quality content". And it gets upvoted, dozens of children comments of people agreeing with them, and everyone pats themselves on the back for such an easy and obvious solution.
Unfortunately, that's simply not the reality we live in. The vast majority (95% or more) of internet users would rather have their content subsidized by ads than have to pay. This has been proven time and time again by the countless subscription model failures over the last decade. Sure, some sites have found success, but those that do are the extremely rare exceptions, not the rule. And none have found fantastic success. How many subscription model websites are in the top 10? Top 100? Top 1000?
Subscription models just don't work. Nuff said, really. There's 10+ years of data to back it up.
I'm not disagreeing with you, but that still doesn't refute the argument that you're selling your audience to someone else without their consent (and before you say "then don't use the site", you don't get to choose whether or not you're exposed to the given sites ads until you go on it, in which case it's already too late. Unless, of course, you use an ad-blocker -- which is why I'm of the opinion that people should use ad-blockers, but I disagree with the article in that I feel there can be cases of responsible, acceptable advertising. Things aren't so black and white, from either side)
> but that still doesn't refute the argument that you're selling your audience to someone else without their consent
You watch the big bang theory and they play an ad during the commercial break for colgate. Did you get sold something without your consent? It's literally the exact same thing.
When you browse the web or when you watch TV, it's inherent to the media that you will see ads and that ads subsidize that content. Admitting to anything else but that inherent truth is (to me) just technicalities and/or pointless pedantry. Unless it's your first time on the 'net, you understand ads subsidize the content you see. Pretending like it's some injustice is almost laughable. It's like you're saying commercials on TV are taking advantage of you every time they cut to a commercial break.
That's an argument against a certain type of advertising. The link explicitly rejects the distinction between ads that monitor and track you and ads than are entirely passive.
I agree with the position set forth by the link. I don't want to be advertised to at all. I cut the cord, I no longer watch TV, I've stopped following sports, I run uBlock Origin... Any site that decides to block ad blockers will simply no longer get a visit from me.
I think advertising is one of the lowest, most pernicious forms of psychological manipulation out there. It simply cannot be done in good faith, by definition.
Some content creators even try to level with their audience about it and say "I'm just putting up this ad to get paid, just ignore it (or click it but don't buy anything) if you want." That's not dealing with the advertising company in good faith.
To me, the only good faith relationship between content creator and audience is the patronage model. This model has endured for centuries and some of our culture's very best artists have relied on it.
Is there such a thing as an entirely passive online ad? Any clickable ad at least knows which site you were on when you clicked; TV advertisers don't know what I was watching when I saw their ad.
That aside, the crucial difference is still this:
TV ads cannot be removed. If they could be, they would be.
Since online ads can be removed, and since doing so provides an enhanced user experience, and since (passive or not) online advertising facilitates the gross pollution of the internet by financing endless numbers of splog, malware and other content-free junk sites, that nobody would ever pay for directly, why not block them?
Laugh all you want. Laughter doesn't change facts.
And facts are -- nobody is indebted to companies who snuck themselves in the content we're interested in. I didn't ask for them there. Did I sign a contract mandating me to not use ad blockers? No. Your move then.
No there isn't anything inherent in the way commercial TV happens to work in the US. There are many other models, including, but not limited to:
- Taxpayer funded television (ala BBC)
- Direct viewer funded television (ala PBS)
- Subscription television (ala HBO, Netflix, etc.)
- Television subsidized by some organization that doesn't advertise but wants to produce content (probably doesn't currently exist, but could)
- Community produced television (ala cable access)
- Any other model you'd like.
Just because the current model exists doesn't mean nothing else could work, and doesn't mean that I should assume anything when I turn on the TV. There's nothing inherent about advertising.
People pay for plenty of content on Kindle Store, for example.
But "books" are on a higher shelf compared to the "content" that people consume mostly out of restless boredom, for which they perhaps are reluctant to pay because they don't really care about it that much anyway.
At least as big an issue I think is that for Kindle books, the analogy is roughly "Amazon = the Internet".
If there was a single vendor who knew my payment information and transparently and simply just made it all work, I'd be far more likely to consider paying for one article here, one article there, etc.
People will pay large monthly bills to read stuff on the Internet -- they do so today to their ISP. But for a variety of reasons, no one is going to pay 750 individual monthly bills for $0.06 each to all the different pages they've stumbled through during the month, even if it works out to be about the same amount of money.
I don't want to pay $0.06 for anything because what could possibly be simultaneously interesting and worth so little?
On the other hand, I gladly pay $5 through the simple checkout thing on LouisCK.com because I trust and respect him and want to support his business.
This is kind of why I'm so lukewarm about the idea of micro payments. It seems to assume a world where everybody gives tiny tips to little blobs of semi-worthless generic content that they probably consume on the bathroom.
I've paid for downloads of independent ebooks too and would happily do it again. If payments are really tedious then that's a general problem and, like, Stripe could just make a browser extension to make it utterly trivial. VISA works pretty well after all, no?
For me, the overwhelming problem seems to be that I'm only genuinely interested in a small subset of high quality things (books, videos, articles) by people I have real respect for.
With most news articles, I'd pay for the privilege of never even hearing about them. But if someone made a plain text newsletter with coherent, intelligent news commentary, I wouldn't think twice about filling out a Stripe pop up for that. I've paid for dumber things in my life.
There's an obvious reason subscriptions don't work, and that's that whilst $4/mo is affordable for many people, that's only for one site. If I had to pay $4/mo each for all the random sites I visit each month... I wouldn't visit those sites any more.
What's really needed is a workable, simple, micropayments model where users can pay just one monthly fee and the sites they visit are compensated automatically.
(And, as an incorrigible cynic, I always wonder whether comments like mahranch's are made by people with a vested interest in the online advertising industry. They certainly wouldn't stand to benefit if the Internet switched to micropayments.)
Well, there's really no reason why Bitcoin should/would be a part of it. Bitcoin is no better at microtransactions than any other payment solution, it's actually worse. So you're left with solutions that involve "off-chain"-type transactions and even then, you have a MAJOR adoption hurdle with Bitcoin that you don't have with credit cards and ACH.
I guess the reason Bitcoin is used is because the payments are to be decentralised and without opt-in from the site's that are getting paid. As opposed to services like Flattr that require signup from the site's before hand.
I think it's up to the user to avoid click-bait. Possibly, knowing that they're directly (or very nearly directly) paying for visits will make some users think twice before following a click-baity link.
But TBH, I'm not convinced people in general hate click-bait as much as people on HN seem to. People buy magazines like National Enquirer, which to me are the print version of click-bait dross.
I don't see how clicking on click bait means you pay/nearly pay. You're only paying if money leaves your bank account. You're just wasting a little time (not much though; just click the back button) and feeling a little stupid for falling for it. Just don't click on linkbait, and make a note not to ever visit that site again. Actually, it'd be nice if adblockers let you blacklist sites and turned their urls into the text "linkbait url removed". I think people DO hate linkbait generally because nobody likes being lied to, which is essentially what's happening.
Just need a way of putting a little real money into some service, and then painlessly transferring a little of it into sites when they ask for it (and I want to pay it). "This page costs x" or "stream y minutes of video for x" or "24 hour access to this site for x" etc.
Sometimes the solution is out there but it's not been made simple enough or is not adopted by enough high profile sites or whatever. There's flattr, a popular one, apparently, although I've never actually seen it used in the wild. You'd need a paywall but where the wall is only a few pennies or a fraction of a penny high. My objection to a paywall is not the need to pay, but the need to sign up for a site ("great, another site i have to trust with my credit card details") and the high cost ("you want £20 now for a months access? I only want to read 1 article"). You'd not buy anything in a real shop if you had to pay up front, in each shop, separately, before you'd even decided you wanted anything from that shop.
How about they are not? Radical I know, but what about having a button on the bottom of the page where you could click to say "this was a good article, flattr it"?
Now you might say very few people would pay for it, but if we assume something like flattr, then your money is already spent. All we are talking about is who gets the booty. And if you aren't a flattr user, then you just get an excert and a signup button.
That version kills click-bait, because who really likes those kinds of articles?
I think Google's "pay not to get ads" service is a good first step. Handling contnet at the ad-server level makes a ton of sense, given that they are already in the business of maximizing CPC/CPM. If users could "bid" on NOT seeing an ad against an advertiser bidding to show you an ad, you disrupt the content creators as little as possible.
Average CPM on a banner ad is $2.80. Let's say you can replace the four most obtrusive banners on pages by out bidding advertisers at a $3.00 CPM. Each pageview then costs you 1.2 pennies.
Of course, CPM's are going to vary wildly depending on the site, but the ad networks can determine this stuff easily enough and you could set your own CPM threshold.
A bidding war could be a scary scenario, but ultimately advertisers will be battling ROI as well and likely lose in the face of new competition.
I love Google's Contributor program and i'm actually at the max contribution now (I started at $1 a month, and over the last 6 months or so gradually increased it because i liked the results i was seeing) The problem is that i've found most people want an "all or nothing" system. They want to see NO ads for their payment, and not have the possibility for some ads.
For those who don't know, Contributor's "thing" is that you pay anywhere from $1 to $15 per month to google, and they basically "bid" in ad spots for you. If you win the bid, then either the ad is removed completely, or a custom image/pattern/element is shown there instead.
Plus it gives you a rundown of where your money went each month, with site-by-site control (you can say only use contributor on these sites, or you can say use contributor on all sites except these). And at the end of the month if you haven't used your entire "contribution" of money, you get it "refunded".
There was some pretty big pushback when it was first announced and i think they went into "let's fix this before trying again" mode.
Originally your contribution wasn't refunded, so if you "pledged" $5 a month and only visited a few sites, google kept the rest. They have fixed that, but i don't think they've made any "relaunch" posts or anything. Maybe they are planning something else before that?
Also it doesn't solve the issue of tracking scripts, so many people won't even consider it, and they are very vocal about it.
Oh, and it only works for google ads. So sites that don't use doubleclick or adsense aren't included.
Premium ad slots on premium sites -- eg the ones most people are actually seeing -- can sell for 10x your $2.80 cpm example. Just adding that it does make the math more challenging
>What's really needed is a workable, simple, micropayments model where users can pay just one monthly fee and the sites they visit are compensated automatically.
You've described a multi-site subscription rather than micropayments. Something like this could work if enough quality sites signed on. I'm not going to pay Wired $4/month. (Heck I think I only pay something like $1/month for the magazine.) But I might consider paying $4/month for a subscription covering a wide range of content.
One problem then is that you're putting loads of content behind some sort of paywall. Which means, among other things, that every time someone shares a link of HN for example, people complain. You do some variants of this with digital magazine subscriptions for example, but none of them have taken off.
In addition, if this approach really succeeded at the broadest scale, you're effectively talking about making a large chunk of the Web subscription only.
True micropayments have their own problems. A lot of people have taken a run at this going back to Web 1.0. The transactional friction associated with getting someone to plop down that penny or nickel to read just seems too great--in addition to the issues with a cross-site subscription.
I'd say there's an even more obvious reason than that; most content simply isn't valuable enough that people would pay for it. Can you support high quality journalism with a subscription model? Possibly, but the audience will be far lower than the audience on todays ad supported sites, and perhaps not even big enough to support two or three seperate ones.
Meanwhile, the vast majority of the world will simply look to any free source of news or information or whatever else that they can get.
And if everyone becomes part of a subscription model, it then leaves a gap in the market for whoever is willing to offer their services for free as a loss leader. As long as at least one person or organisation is willing to offer their services for free (even as part of a short term plan to get a large audience behind them), a subscription model will remain non viable for most sites and publications.
The core of the problem is that's easy and cheap to copy content(while rephrasing, for legality). So unless you need the content right now(or need it from a reliable source, say for your job/investments/etc), you could probably find most of what you're interested in offered for free, or something similar to it, which is good enough.
> What's really needed is a workable, simple, micropayments model where users can pay just one monthly fee and the sites they visit are compensated automatically.
It's quite amazing that the 6 years old flattr (https://flattr.com/) didn't emerge as the solution
>There's an obvious reason subscriptions don't work, and that's that whilst $4/mo is affordable for many people, that's only for one site.
That's because we need a platform, not per site subscriptions. They have a quite succesful such platform in the Netherlands from what I've heard (for their local media).
Spotify, Rdio and the rest absolutely work -- and it's a similar model, only in this case the "mediator/platform" should be neutral.
>> They have a quite succesful such platform in the Netherlands from what I've heard
Is it the Correspondent? Does 40K members paying 65euro/year, and their achievements doesn't sound that differentiated from what is available on the web, for free(although it might take a bit of effort to filter) [1]:
"we broke the news of a major European bank’s involvement in illegal land grabs in some of the poorest regions of Europe; in another piece, our Technology and Surveillance Correspondent warned readers about the security risks of using public wifi networks; and our Hacker Correspondent demonstrated why you might want to think twice before posting photos of your children online. With these and other stories, we strive to provide readers with new perspectives for understanding how the world works."
Reading the rest, it seems the major reason for their success is their "expert community " and the access to that you get via subscription - altough i wonder how do they compare to other web based communities.
>Is it the Correspondent? Does 40K members paying 65euro/year, and their achievements doesn't sound that differentiated from what is available on the web, for free(although it might take a bit of effort to filter)
No, it was an aggregator, not a news outlet itself.
Can't find the original article I've read about the service, but it seems it is this:
That said, 40K paying members for something like this, considering the Dutch population is quite an achievement. That would be like 1 million people in the US.
But still, this Correspondent thing is nothing like what I described (and think will work as a solution) which would be an easy to pay, ad-free, aggregation platform.
But(from an article in business insider): "It may well be that Blendle has been so successful in the Netherlands because the publications that have signed up have been Dutch language, rather than English, in which articles are often replicated hundreds of times over. But Klöpping[the founder] believes the Netherlands is no different than any other country"
I'm from Israel, a country about half the population of the Netherlands. And there's a really small amount of blogs worth reading and a small amount of indie newspapers/magazine like sites - so most of the time when i do read in hebrew, i use maybe 2 of the large sites.
On top of that, if you want to replicate content in hebrew, you're probably an Israeli, you have more lucrative jobs. But many poor people in the third world do know english pretty well, and the english market is bigger, so there are enough people willing to do that job,
So the situation is very different. But sure it would be interesting to see how the u.s. expansion goes.
EDIT: one thing though - i see their most popular piece is an in depth analysis of how will middle east will look in 2035. Seems like something that might not fit ad-based content(it's too long, making it both hard to copy well, and not fit for ads, and also credibility of the author matters). Now i really want to see what kind of content this produces in english.
>I'm from Israel, a country about half the population of the Netherlands. And there's a really small amount of blogs worth reading and a small amount of indie newspapers/magazine like sites - so most of the time when i do read in hebrew, i use maybe 2 of the large sites.
Depends on the country I guess. I'm from another small country in the area, comparable to Holland in population, and we have tons of news sites (commercial) and lots of blogs. That said, we also had in the past 3 decades an overabundance of print outlets, so we might not be that typical.
There needs to be some sort of combination between subscriptions and "pay as you go." I pay for The Washington Post, since I tend to read it almost every day. I won't pay $4/month for Wired, since I'm not a regular reader. I'd pay say 50 cents an article, though, if that were an option. That goes for The Economist, Scientific American, and a number of other sites.
The main issue with this type of payment model isn't the money; it's the mechanics of it.
If something behind the scenes automatically took my $0.50, kept track of the fact that I was entitled to read it on any device and browser I might use anytime in the future, and didn't bug me about it ever again, then it might be workable. I don't have a problem paying a few cents for an article. I have a problem manually entering into the transaction to pay a few cents every time I want to read an article throughout the day.
Netflix and Spotify might argue with you. Subscriptions might not work in all case, but as these threads demonstrate, there are many alternatives depending on your content (micropayments, or sponsored content for newspapers).
Ads of today don't work, the widespread and increasing use of content blockers back it up.
Spotify isnt really making money. The other music services have all failed.
Netflix is the only streaming service seeing some success, and they don't own or produce most of their content or the delivery systems. If they did, their business wouldn't be viable either.
Given that Spotify is private, how would you know if Spotify is making money? How about Pandora Radio? They have about 80M users; is that a failure?
What exactly is meant by Netflix not owning their delivery system? That seems like a rather specious argument. HBO GO, Hulu, MLB, Sling TV and the 100s of other OTT services seem to be missing from your industry understanding.
>Given that Spotify is private, how would you know if Spotify is making money?
Industry observers see the financial numbers from Spotify filings in the UK and Luxembourg and can piece together that they spend more than they take in. Another source of information about Spotify health was the Sony email leaks[1] revealing the unfavorable terms to license the Sony music catalog.
Lastly, CEO Daneil Ek has been on record[2] saying, "we believe in the business model of Spotify, and believe that ultimately we’ll become profitable at some point..."
It is not wild speculation that Spotify is losing money.
>How about Pandora Radio? They have about 80M users; is that a failure?
Pandora is also still losing money.[3] Whether it's 80M or 800M users, it's a failure if the business can't turn a profit. (Otherwise known as costs exceeding revenue.)
The overwhelming "costs" in both music streaming services is the royalty payouts for licensing music. So far, not enough people can be convinced to pay $9.99/month. Or, the people that are willing to pay something-per-month are not willing to pay higher amounts such as $19.99.[4] So far, the financial numbers are not working.
I think the key is so far. It might not turning a profit, but ~1bn in revenue is still a strong argument that you can get the subscriptions model working for online music streaming and is not doomed to failure from the very beginning.
> Given that Spotify is private, how would you know if Spotify is making money? How about Pandora Radio? They have about 80M users; is that a failure?
There are plenty of public reports of Spotify revenues and losses that show they're having trouble. Pandora has had continual losses and the stock isnt doing well either. There's only more drama coming with artists and studios demanding more money so it's a very tough market and isn't going as well as it might seem on the surface. User counts don't matter if the business can't sustain itself.
> What exactly is meant by Netflix not owning their delivery system?
Traditionally there were cable companies that owned the delivery infrastructure and studios that produced the content. Netflix is neither (although they're getting a little into the production business). They will continue to feel pressure from both sides as the traditional companies start to compete much more strongly with digital offerings. Regardless, if Netflix was actually producing all the content they have, they wouldnt be in business today.
My point in response to the GP reply is that subscriptions aren't easy. Netflix and Spotify were named but both have issues and arent clear winners. Leasing content doesn't show the true cost of that content and while it might work for audio/video resellers, it's not going to help all the major web content/news publishers.
>> Regardless, if Netflix was actually producing all the content they have, they wouldn't be in business today.
Sure, but that's just a growth phase, right ? Once Netflix becomes fully global(and as successful it hopes), won't it revenues fully support the content ?
I've struggled with this myself. A while back, due to linkage from here and other sites, I had used up my free allotment of free nytimes stories and thought, "hey, let me see if I can pay a bit to raise the limit, because I'm willing to pay a bit for journalism." So I checked out their subscription plans and could find nothing even remotely close to worthwhile for me.
There were disconnects between how they viewed subscriptions vs. what I wanted:
* They offered access to all of their content for a price that would have been fair if I would be reading some significant fraction of it. But I wanted to raise my cap from X stories/month to 2X stories per month and have it cost something reasonable. Or something close, like 5X stories. They need to get over the idea that the way people read news today is by going to a single site and reading through a fair amount of it, like people used to do with a physical newspaper.
* The subscriptions were for what I'd call "odd" time periods like 6 weeks. WAT. Why not 5 or 7 weeks, or multiples of 10 days? What happens when my 6 weeks is up? I start getting renewal emails? Quit messing around and quote a recurring monthly rate with discount for longer commitments.
Anyway, I went there intending to give them some money even though I only occasionally go over the free limit, and left without signing up, slightly bewildered.
> That's why I don't like this sentence. Every time the topic of ads come up here or on reddit, people always say "I'd pay for high quality content". And it gets upvoted, dozens of children comments of people agreeing with them, and everyone pats themselves on the back for such an easy and obvious solution.
I'm willing to pay for high-quality content, it's just that whenever a "pay" option is offered, it's usually overpriced. The standard Netflix subscription costs ~$10/month; the online subscription to Wired costs $4/month. Is accessing a single random website (Wired) worth 40% of Netflix to me? No, not really. Am I going to spend hundreds of dollars a month to individually subscribe to every website I use? No, I'm not doing that either.
Add to that that I'm extremely wary of subscriptions for obvious reasons.
I'd gladly pay for content if I could subscribe to most websites I use with a single service at reasonable prices (or better yet, buy credits/access-triggered weekly passes for them).
I think this is related to the importance of defaults. If a site charged $4 per year, and then, in an unrelated transaction a user could opt-in to advertising to cover that $4 fee, you'd see a tiny fraction of people expressing the "preference" you think they are expressing.
I really, reallly wish there was an AdBlock software with a proper acceptable ads. Get a few people to inspect websites with lets say 10-20-30$(cheap for any website which actually wants to make money) application fee to cover the cost of the inspection and whitelist that website. OF course give us plain and precise information about what is acceptable with a few levels of control from the user, plus a button to report a website that is actually not doing good. Once you lose your privileges, you pay double/triple or more to apply again.
This is actually what I do for myself, have over 300 sites which i visit semi-occasionally, that have disabled ads because I like those websites and those ads are actually something worth my connection, a nice way to pay out to the website. If AdBlock had done this, I really believe it would have been so much better than as it is right now.
I am willing to pay about half that, but only on a one of basis with articles I like. Something like flatter, but universal and most importantly very simple to cancel.
The reason is simple, I no longer read a particular newspaper, I read whatever I get linked to on twitter, hn or facebook. Somehow newspapers don't seem to get this.
There's no lack of high-quality content around the web. True, it's a bit hard to discover it amid the noise. And most often, larger communities are gathered around click-baity content, and that's why we go there. And yes, maybe it's not fresh from the ovens but a bit late.
So even if there may be a need in money, maybe it would be better spend on solving those problems first ?
I think with computers we can make a system that makes it easy for website to charge a small fee (per article or per website) and that notifies/promts the user in a simple way with the cost.
It doesnt have to cost much, since advertisers are not paying big amounts per pageview either.
You can build a strong paywall, or you make it a gate where visitors can easily go through.
It won't work. This is the internet, it's not some single country or smaller community you can just push a transaction system onto at this point. It really just doesn't make sense.
The internet can handle it, there are lots of services that make payments across the globe possible.
This system would be rolled out per website that wants it.
I just made an account to say this is utter BS. If someone provides a service that costs them money to run, they have the right to make money off of it. If you don't agree don't use their service. Whatever. Or block ads and donate to the service. Just don't be a freeloader.
If companies don't want to offer stuff for free, they should probably stop doing it. Put their website behind a paywall. You can't have it both ways, complaining about non-paying visitors when you didn't try to charge them.
No, they don't, because they're marketing their service to users under the false pretense that it's "free" thereby explicitly associating it with "costs zero money" while in reality it does cost money that they do charge, only someone else in some other way.
Consumers have the right and ability to completely destroy this business model and should exercise it, sooner the better. Most companies compete by stating prices on products, it's absurd that a select few get to state prices in long ToS and/or privacy policies that we know nobody reads.
It doesn't matter one bit if it's a mom-and-pop store or a tech giant that goes out of business because people are fed up with tracking, malware, and advertising.
This is ridiculous. I'll be first to admit a lot of the advertising models are broken, but there are acceptable ads. Many of the advertising structures on iOS, for example, work well. There are websites that do simple advertising, without trackers, like Daring Fireball that are more than acceptable.
Can we stop with the repetitive anti-advertising FUD, please?
There are acceptable ads. But has the internet's sites overall used best practices remotely? Nope. They've used auto-play video and audio, performance and bandwidth hogging schemes, even malware, and countless other things. The trust is lost.
I agree that this _is_ ridiculous. The fact some ads are OK doesn't mean the pool isn't poisoned and users are done with it.
Unfortunately, this gist is based on the same fallacy that the one it opposes is based on: the idea that visiting sites and consuming their content is a primary need for visitors.
The so-called "other ways of funding" are paywalls. If every blog, YouTube videos, online newspaper, start-up, etc, were behind a paywall, people would just nope out because it wouldn't not worth it, at all. Disabling ads wouldn't result in other ways of funding, it would result in people not working on creating content because they wouldn't be able to make a business out of it.
On the other hand, and for the same reason, content creator shouldn't complain that people block their ads. We don't need to visit your site, we don't need your content, it's a bonus. We don't care whether you make money or not. You chose not to make a paywall (and that's probably a good idea since nobody would pay) and hand over your content for free bundled with ads. We can technically cut out the ads. If you don't want us to do so, make them so that their annoyance isn't worth the effort of cutting them out.
Lots of people say that if we all start blocking ads, then lots of content will go away. I'm perfectly fine with that, as the majority of 'content' is complete rubbish. The web used to be populated by hobbyists who made their own websites not expecting compensation, and they were generally high quality. Now it's ruled by clickbait and ad infested contentless garbage, I'm happy if it all dies.
> Lots of people say that if we all start blocking ads, then lots of content will go away. I'm perfectly fine with that
Except it's more of a butterfly effect than people realize. Not just "article" type content, but also innovation. I doubt sites like reddit would exist (at least in their current form) without ads. Hell, they barely get by with ads. Google wouldn't exist without ads, etc etc... Sure those sites exist now, and you take ads away, they're already entrenched, but what about the future google or reddit or facebook?
A lot of innovation has been spurred from people's passions and their hobbies, but much more innovation has taken place as a result of people trying to make a quick easy buck. And that's what ads promise.
Everything from your favorite news website to your favorite android app wouldn't exist (or likely wouldn't exist) if not for ads. I don't think people (hackernews users) really have thought about how much innovation on the internet is directly and indirectly related to ads. If you actually stop and think about it, the complexity can boggle your mind.
"Innovation" that harms society (such as anything dependent on advertising) isn't actually innovation we want. I'm very aware of all the supposed "innovation" that is largely greed cargo culting other successful businesses, or simply a scam.
I'm perfectly fine with all of this pathological "innovation" finally going away.
In my experience, well targeted advertising is highly beneficial in connecting you with products you may want. I have bought a handful of things I never would have known about from Facebook ads. Good advertising isn't intrusive and isn't harmful, it's genuinely wonderful.
I'm not going to say advertising harms society in and of itself but too much of anything is harmful. Unchecked, advertising serves to create an insatiable consumerism where enough is never enough and a general feeling of discontent in the target audience.
Wouldn't you have found these products by research, from people sharing the same interests, or through independant reports?
Every product I saw through an ad that looked remotely useful was either unactionable, critically flawed, overpriced or sub-par compared to the rival products.
For the harm to society, my go to example would be ad reads on podcasts.
There will be products that the hosts of the shows have been personally using for a long time and happens to sponsor the show. Naturally the ad read will be overall positive, but if you followed the host for a while on other shows, it
becomes clear that they are more or less stuck with the product for now but are looking for alternatives because of some critical shortcomming. It also means that any discussion surrounding the sponsor's field (other rival products, or problems occuring peripherically to the product) won't be happening.
Overall the more relevant the ad becomes, the more perverse effects it generates.
While I feel of often does, that's not the claim I made which was about the harm from when you are dependent on advertising.
If your product is only profitable as a vehicle for advertisements, there is a conflict of interest between your goals with the product and advertisers goals. As we have seen in many cases over the last half-century, eventually the interests of the advertiser take over. The slide of TV shows from having only a few commercials between shows to the current idiocy of literally having more commercial than show on some channels is an obvious example of this trend.
> In my experience
I suspect you're engaging in selection bias. Most people don't even notice costs associated with advertising, because they already have high tolerance. Try isolating yourself away from any advertising for about two months; I doubt you will look upono advertising so favorably after that.
> A lot of innovation has been spurred from people's passions and their hobbies, but much more innovation has taken place as a result of people trying to make a quick easy buck.
I'm not sure I believe that, but I do believe a lot more pointless/useless/malicious garbage has been produced by people trying to make a quick easy buck than people motivated by their passion or hobby.
> Everything from your favorite news website to your favorite android app wouldn't exist (or likely wouldn't exist) if not for ads.
If making money from ads is the primary motivation for a site or app, then it shouldn't exist.
If they need to make money to survive they should charge people directly and honestly, rather than cynically whoring eyeballs to the highest bidder; if it's something genuinely worth paying for, people will pay.
> If making money from ads is the primary motivation for a site or app, then it shouldn't exist.
So you're saying anyone designing a website or an android app needs to be creating their wares purely altruistically? And if not, their products shouldn't exist? Because that's essentially what you're saying.
Sure, some people create content or products because they are passionate about that particular thing. But those people are a tiny minority. Most people make things and create content for a paycheck.
Seeing it as anything else is a bit naive and idealistic. It's far removed from the reality in which we live.
So Google, Facebook, and Reddit might not exist, so what? Other services and models will take their place. It reminds me of this Jack Black clip on piracy[1] where he essentially claims if artists can't make loads of cash, there will be no more art.
This argument is simply a scare tactic employed by monopolies of every kind. "Too Big to Fail" banks say the economy won't exist without them. The MPAA claims art won't exist without them. Advertisers say internet content won't exist without them.
> Other services and models will take their place.
You're missing the point. You fail to grasp the scope and size of the reach that ads have on the internet. I saw what the internet was like before the masses arrived, I was here online back in 1995 and while the lack of ads was nice, "the internet" was a ghost town. Those sites wouldn't, couldn't exist without ads. Hell, google isn't a search engine, it's first and foremost an ad company. That's where 95% of their revenue comes from! Their search feature is just a vehicle to display ads. Literally.
> This argument is simply a scare tactic employed by monopolies of every kind.
Except it's not a scare tactic and it's not an argument, it's a fact. Even if it it was both, it doesn't make it any less true. Advertisements actually do spur innovation and there's tons of data and studies to back it up:
"Google wouldn't exist without ads, etc etc... Sure those sites exist now, and you take ads away, they're already entrenched, but what about the future google or reddit or facebook?"
Allow me to point out that you have just posted this comment on the future reddit.
> Allow me to point out that you have just posted this comment on the future reddit.
Hah, this place is not the future reddit. Not remotely close. This place has been around just as long as reddit and has never tried to be reddit. In fact, they work towards trying hard not to be reddit. This place is the old reddit. This is actually a lot like how reddit circa 2007 was. Reddit evolved, HN did not. Reddit and hackernews serve different purposes. HN isn't trying to grow larger like reddit was. Reddit became about community building while HN is trying to remain a tech oriented link aggregator.
I use uBlock origin and love it. But I have a mental conflict. I run 135+ university web sites (for one university) with no ads and no flash. But we do use google analytics and include some 3rd party fonts on specific sites. Many ad blockers block google analytics and some block the fonts.
I haven't started counting how many users are blocking google analytics. I'm less worried about the fonts because the designers have accounted for that and they downgrade to something that is acceptable (at least to me). We are seeing a decline in new users to our sites but college applications are up. I'd love to know if that decline is false and is just because google analytics is blocked.
I think it is time to put some code in and see what the real numbers are for ad blocking on our main site.
Google Analytics (and other comparable services) will often be blocked by tools such as EFF's Privacy Badger. It depends on your audience how many users do this. If you want reliable metrics, analyse your webserver's access logs instead, or implement a usage logging solution that does not depend on calls to a third party domain.
Fonts hosted at a third party can be blocked, but not as often as analytics services. You could simply host the WOFF files with your website. As long as you configure the webserver to serve these fonts with the proper caching headers, users should only request them once.
There are plenty of web stats/analytics packages that you can install on your own web server, which ad blockers wont block, that will stop you from continuing to hand over your users browser history to Google.
And there's no reason for your fonts to be blocked by an ad blocker. Just serve them from your own web server instead of a privacy invading CDN.
Maybe move to a self-hosted analytics tool? I've seen some like piwik that use JavaScript just like Google Analytics, but I wonder if there's any that can simply be added as a plugin to Apache or nginx or as a middleware for node.js, etc.
I don’t have a problem with ads per se. I have a problem with profiling. Besides been scary, I also find it annoying. If I’m visiting a site about video games I’d rather see related ads, not an ad about a product I happened to search a couple of days ago. Just because I searched for shoes doesn’t mean it’s the only product I’m interested in. I also have a problem with web pages that load half a dozen ads that eat too much space and make readability a pain in the behind.
I’m not naïve to expect that a $50bn industry will just disappear. What I’d like to disappear though is the gazillion of sites that steal content from major venues and monetize through AdSense. Which begs the question why Google accepts them in the first place. In the long term I don’t think there will be tectonic changes in the adverting industry. If publishers start serving ads from their own domains the whole ad blocking thing will become obsolete, or we’ll have to think of more aggressive ways to block ads. I would though like to see some adoption of micropayments. For the time being no publisher seems to be heading that way, they all ask for ridiculous subscriptions of something like $1/week which if you read a couple of articles per month becomes too expensive.
The other thing that I also don’t like and I rarely see it mentioned, is affiliate marketing. I wonder if there’s a plugin to render affiliate links obsolete by stripping away the referrer part. I don’t like when sites become salesmen because it gives me the impression that the whole purpose of the content was to promote a product.
I can stretch as far as saying that if a blocker can detect it, it's too invasive. That includes, for example if it is served from an ad network.
I don't mind ad pictures in magazines. The same should be ok on websites.
Im not sure what fraction of the Internet is paid for by ad-network revenue, but I really don't care if half the content on the Internet suddenly dies in a fire because their measly income from ad networks dries up. I'm happy with only truly free, properly monetized (affiliate links, proper sponsoring), or paid for content.
Just because you can do something about it easily, doesn't mean you are entitled to it.
It's a lot harder to remove ads from TV so no one seems to think they are unacceptable, no matter how terrible they are.
Don't like the ads? Don't consume the content. Or at least treat adblocking for what it is: a hack made easily available to you by the Web. If you consider them as part of the content (which they are) you'll see that the argument for the entitlement to remove ads falls flat
"The first digital video recorder (DVR) with a built-in commercial skipping feature was ReplayTV with its "4000 Series" and "5000 Series" units. In 2002 the main television networks and movie studios sued ReplayTV, claiming that skipping advertisements during replay violates copyright."
>It's a lot harder to remove ads from TV so no one seems to think they are unacceptable, no matter how terrible they are.
I would disagree, as many others who do not even own a TV. Or people who record broadcast and fast forward ads. Streaming is huge.
I go less frequently to the cinema, because I have to watch 20 minutes of ads (+trailers) before the actual movie.
I think this all boils down to whenever there's an implied contract between consumer and producer, that requires the former to consume the content exactly in a way producer had decided it should be consumed (i.e. with any ads bundled, kept intact - but not limited to this).
If you gave me a journal, can you expect me to read it in full? If you had sent me a video, can you expect me to watch it without skipping anything? If you had served me a webpage, can you expect me to render it as you expect it to be rendered?
I think it depends on whenever a person believes they have the right to control the machine(s) they own to behave in a way they like - even if this is about controlling of how third-party content is rendered - or not.
I do view ads as a part of the content. Whatever is served is the content. And I feel I'm fully entitled to control the UA that's rendering of any content (because it's my browser running on my machine). I make the tiny fonts larger, disable videos auto-starting, use "reading mode" if I feel like I don't like the design or contrast, and I tell my browser to render only what I consider necessary (by filtering out ads, social share buttons or whatever I don't care about). When I feel like my eyes are stressed out and I'm file with hearing some monotonous voice, I even dare to use TTS to read the content aloud.
From this viewpoint, ads are not something special in this scenario. It just happens that I find them anything from just unnecessary to maliciously noisy - so I instruct my machine to not bother to process those. As far as I decide about my machine's resources, it's fair - that's the idea.
That said, if someone had lost^W not gained money because I didn't do something they expected me to do - as long as I haven't promised (or was otherwise required) to do so, that's usually not my problem. One might say I'm ethically obliged to watch any ads bundled, but as far as I see, the opinions on the matter vary and I conclude there isn't any established "common sense" on this subject.
And, well, if some website owner doesn't like that they absolutely can ignore my requests - it's not like I'm entitled for their content: I've asked if I could get one, and they gave me some. Heard, Wired does this (I don't read Wired).
The argument that the content is rendered on your machine and therefore you should be able to control it as you see fit is fine, but I don't think it holds much ground practically speaking.
Netflix sends me highly compressed content that my computer must decode in order for me to watch it. I have though many times of applying a gamma curve to dark scenes or boost voice in some dialogs, but I never do it because it would be kind of hard and tools aren't readily available.
Ad blocking on the Web, on the other hand, is next to trivial, and that's why most people do it.
The only reason netflix is harder is DRM. The entire point of DRM is that you give up control of the client.
Stop supporting DRM and applying a gamma curve is easy (just give mpv the --gamma option). There are several dynamic range compressors that could be used to to the voice boost.
The adblocker test isn't very thorough. It just checks whether an image can be downloade from gstatic.com. It told me that I don't have an adblocker installed when in fact I have ublock origin with the setting that it can download images from gstatic.com
1. Tries to load a file called ads.css which is usually blocked in default installations of many blockers relying on Easy List.
2. It uses gstatic.com to check if acceptable ads are being allowed - gstatic.com is whitelisted by Adblock Plus, so we test for it and warn users that acceptable ads are being let through.
We're going to be updating the detection to detect use of other blockers.
286 comments
[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 329 ms ] threadGoogle gets to crawl all the web for free for its search results. Maybe Google should start paying websites for crawling them hey ? Of course if you crawl google search you're now violating their TOS ... how does google make money again ? Ad networks like Google ( because that's what Google is ) can't have it both ways.
Ads can be also a way to monetise something that doesn't reach the value threshold where people will pay directly.
E.g. Niche blogs sometimes have a lot of visitors (they are providing some value) but not enough to get paid directly. Even patreon most times doesn't work.
When ads are served locally, avoid tracking, remain kept out of the way and are kept strictly within the topic of the content - then we are talking about a reasonable starting point.
Unfortunately the current ad ecosystem seems to be diametrically opposed to this. As far as I can see, the ad vendors brought this situation upon themselves.
EDIT: typofixes.
To my mind, ads are, in the absence of my prior informed consent, an outright theft of the computing and networking resources I pay for. (Not to mention the attention thing and the propaganda/pernicious-psychology things.)
I could not agree more: There are NO acceptable ads.
By the way, we're in no way affiliated with uBlock Origin. Just think it's currently the best ad blocker out there for users.
What ways can you imagine? Within a few minutes I came up with:
1) Someone else paying for you seeing ads.
2) You paying for using the site or an associated service.
3) Someone else paying for influencing what the site does for you.
4) Someone else paying for your data on that site.
And, the one that people rely on too much:
5) Someone else paying for nothing, hoping the site can be sold later at a profit.
One that can realistically cover only a small portion of sites:
6) The site being run as part of a charity.
Do you find one of those generally more preferable than 1), or can see a point I'm missing?
Brushing over the core issue as if someone else is certainly going to solve it in a timely fashion through sheer pressure in a way that is going to turn out preferable to advertisement.
Is that really all you have to offer?
Or rephrasing it a little, in a way that explain why it makes sense to let you use the free version
-) The x% probability that a free user will create a paid user (either my becoming one or by referring other free users that become one)
In contrast the rise of ad companies like taboola is actively degrading content and experiences and debasing previously respected sites. If you insist on showing intrusive advertising, users will go elsewhere. The failure of that business model based on ads is simply not the reader's problem to solve.
That's the whole problem. Most of the pablum you see on the internet isn't worth enough for people to pay for it.
Sure I'll read it if it's free (ad subsidized) but if it wasn't there I probably wouldn't miss 90% of it.
An option missing from your list is sites providing free access to the first few articles in order to generate interest in their paid offerings. Newspapers sometimes do this; on their own sites and at aggregate services providing paid access to the articles from several newspapers and magazines.
- Brave browser, blocks/replaces all ads by default, ran by one of the founders of Mozilla
- the Dutch company Blendle provides an ad-free, pay-per-article service: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blendle
- Beacon is a crowd-funding platform for journalism https://www.beaconreader.com/
Think of music streaming services and how you don't need to listen to a barrage of ads on the radio anymore.
It's a similar problem as how to fund high quality open source development.
Something to think about.
...and ads are still the best solution to certain problems.
As most people, I don't like ads. But this is capitalism, a system fueled by consumption. Without changing the system, ads will never disapeer, they will always come back with a different form, they are a necessary 'evil'.
[edit/disclaimer] I don't work on ads, I only curate a niche blog.
A system that doesn't end in consumption either doesn't produce anything, or produces for no reason, which seems wasteful.
Anyway, this was not the point the GP made, and thus not what I responded to.
The problem with declaring something "far from perfect" is deciding what perfect looks like. The fact that even the poor has a Walmart-sized vote in what gets produced looks like a pretty strong vindication of the system to me. Sure, there are always areas that can be improved, I'm not declaring the current state of things perfect, but I'm appealing to a focus on specific, practical improvement, rather than a yearning for an abstract perfect state that epistemologically probably can't be known.
Since the system is made of people producing goods and services for other people to enjoy (consume) what is the problem with feeding the system itself?
Absolutely, some sorts of production are destructive in excess of the consumption value of the goods produced, but most certainly aren't, so I don't see how that indictes the system as a whole.
The problem, IMHO, happens when we don't 'fuel' the capitalistic 'society engine' with more and more consumption, strange things seem to happen: the 'engine' stiffs.
[0] http://yacy.net/en/index.html
People don't pay for low-quality content, and don't pay when a free _and simpler_ alternative is available.
https://www.asc.upenn.edu/news-events/publications/tradeoff-...
Of course, there is also the possibility that the actual market value of a lot off "content" is zero. In those cases, deriving your revenue from advertising distorts the market.
Also, I can make a study and get whatever results I wish. Talk about fallacies.
My challenge stands. Go ahead, start a search engine and charge people to use it.
I don't think it is a fair way to argue at all when someone links to an actual study, and you assert that all studies are worthless?
Plot twist: the study is not actually on topic.
Generally people want to get the best value for their money - free things are the positive extreme of good value for money... and whilst people will pay more for something that is better than the free version, this is often a very small proportion of those who will use a free version. at least based on my real world experiences from working on apps that have both free and paid versions...
away from the extreme this logic is obviously faulty though. i've seen many cases where /raising/ a price increases the volume sold... which completely baffles me.
It's a basic protection of investment.
That, and most "techies" here are just working in traditional business fields, selling stuff, producing products, marketing things.
It's on the same level of idiocy as thinking all the "brightest minds" are in tech or working in Silicon Valley, "print is dead", or that social media doesn't matter.
i'm glad someone else notices this though and is willing to call it out as idiotic. that is exactly what it is. :)
Just because i occasionally browse gaming news do not mean i want a face full of glowing eyes or rotting flesh wherever i go.
It's at the opposite end of the spectrum from taboola say, and is probably the most acceptable form of advertising I've seen. So both customers and advertisers like it.
Advertising is about matching up your intent with what the advertiser is selling, and there's no clearer signal of this than what you type into a search bar because you're letting Google know exactly what you're looking for at that moment.
While Google does have a big ad network for banners and text ads across the web, their search ads are very well targeted by your search queries in addition to all the profile information they have about you. This gives them an amazing ad platform that works very well for pretty much all of their clients.
The only other company that comes close today is Facebook which works by mining all the data that is shared and estimating intent through your likes, updates and interactions.
Saying "no ad is acceptable" is just so out of reality it's not even funny.
I do use Ublock and I do deactivate it for sites I think are worthy.
https://www.eff.org/privacybadger
I've used Adblock, Adblock Plus, Noscript and Ghostery. Since several months I've changed to Privacy Badger. The first time I tried it, I thought it didn't work, but it seems it needs a little time to collect info and start blocking. Since then I've had no issues with it. It's easy to unblock individual sites, if something doesn't work, and then re-blocking it again.
The only problem is that when I want to unblock one specific functionality on a website, it's very difficult to find out which scripts to allow. At first you see the PB has four items blocked. Easy you think, you can try four times, and then it should work. But those four items load another twenty, and then it gets complicated. This is not Privacy Badger's fault, just the complexity of websites nowadays. But if you could allow specific services, instead of specific scripts, that would be great.
I can't give a useful review, nothing more than that it works for me like Adblock and Ghostery have worked.
I'm tired of low quality content, I want to be supporting serious, intelligent journalism that goes a bit further than the click-bait we're stuck with at the moment. Even the content traditional newspapers are putting out online has become vapid, they need to start shooting for the standards they used to and become comfortable with charging for it.
I've got £50/month waiting for quality content. Maybe not everyone does? But then again plenty of people were happy/able to pay for their daily newspaper. It feels like there's a gaping hole in the market at the moment, I'm hopeful that we're seeing the start of the return to journalism.
There are Wired articles I would pay to read, but I don't want the whole corpus.
Micro payments cannot come soon enough.
Any idea how to encourage quality content with micropayments? The naive implementation would be to charge on opening the article, but I suspect that would just encourage more click-bait headlines. Short articles can still contain good content, so just tracking reading time wouldn't be sufficient either.
https://flattr.com
I'm hyperbolizing, but even if it were $100/month, it wouldn't be worth the space. What this space needs is someone with deep pockets to subsidize the publisher growth until the critical mass of users is reached.
I know I must be missing something here, but what is actually preventing a service where a number on your account (which you have funded with $10, because lots of quality news and content sites are signed up to it) decreases by 00.10 and someone else's number (whose article you just paid to read) increases by 00.10?
One the face of it, this seems like the easiest thing in the world to accomplish, particularly for already established, trusted and extensively used payment-related companies like Paypal.
This is one of those ways, so not sure why you think our piece shouldn't be taken seriously.
When Adele's last album arrived it ran pieces about the awesomeness of Adele for days without a break, until it became a running joke in the comments.
Of course it's impossible to prove the content was bought and paid for, but unless the editor is the biggest Adele fan in the world in the history of ever it's hard to imagine the staff at an international daily spontaneously filing Adele puff pieces without prompting.
Monetization of content is a business opportunity waiting to happen. Something like a network where you put, I dunno $10 per month and every article you read is charged for $0.10, as an example. Or unlimited during the month for $1
If news sites can allow us to Tweet or Fb an article it might be possible to 'coin' an article as well in a seamless manner
Payment would have to be anonymous for this to work.
With the communications technology we have now, it's hard for anyone to add significant value in the middle between the source of the news (scientists, inventors, politicians, entertainers, witnesses, etc.) and the public.
For example, 25 years ago the media spent a lot of airtime and ink on the beating of Rodney King, and indeed we only heard about it thanks to the media. Now, we can watch similar videos on YouTube, read court documents and the police departments' press releases directly, and hear thousands of diverse opinions on social media. That role of the old media is obsolete.
But I'd still pay for accurate, unbiased investigative journalism.
https://www.brave.com/
From the homepage:
"With Brave, you can choose whether to see ads that respect your privacy or pay sites directly. Either way, you can feel good about helping fund content creators."
So you could choose the ad-free option and have Brave pay the sites you visit.
The thing is, historically speaking this kind of content has been free. The goal of the world wide web was to provide people with the ability to publish for themselves, and it was a smash hit success because it turned out that when you give people the ability to publish their work, they may only write two things in their entire life but they care so much about those things they're a lot higher quality than what you get out of forbes today.
With a whole internet full of people only writing (or filming, or recording, or coding, or whatever) one or two things, there's a world of fantastic content out there. Lots of it is in old forums, some of it has been monitized by ads (youtube), but most of it is still free as the authors intended.
But then the notion of earning an income on ads came along, and with it came the concept of clickbait. Quality took a dive and formerly free content got jailed up behind paywalls or plastered with ads. The amazing conceit was that the people who did this think because they did the work, they deserve to get paid. It never crosses their mind that we might wish they hadn't done the work in the first place.
The honest truth is, I'm tired of low quality content too, so I'm blocking ads to try and kill of the companies making it.
That's unfair, and almost flat out wrong. Content and ads pretty much evolved hand in hand. Sure, there was some content up before ads came along, but ads came up almost immediately after. There was also practically no content on the 'net compared to today. The net back then was... almost non-existent. It was a ghost town. You had sites like prodigy and compuserve hosting a large chunk of the 'net and they did have ads. This was in the mid 90s.
There was plenty of amateur content put up for fun before the ad explosion. There were search engines for the content. And there was a lot of academic and technical information.
Then the business types moved and tried to turn the entire web into a strip mall. To some extent they succeeded. Twitchy pointless banners invaded a lot of pages.
To a large extent they failed, because the purveyors of twitchy little banners pretended they have the same user impact as print and TV advertising - and that idea has always been demonstrably wrong.
The problem is that the twitchy little banners created an entire economy of user sharking, which completely fails to understand that the best ads give real value to users - either by providing truly useful leads, or by being beautiful and interesting. Networked web ads are none of the above.
Occasionally you'll see sites that sell space to a narrow targeted niche relevant to readers of those pages. Those tend to do much better.
But the scatter-shot nature of web advertising puts it on the same level as email spam. It's not useful, it's not interesting, it's not beautiful, it's just distracting and annoying. Most of it provides no user benefit at all.
It deserves to die until that changes. If it can't exist without being parasitic on content, then the market needs to kill it off until it works out how to pays its way.
And the content industry needs to get over itself and start producing outstanding, irreplaceable, content that readers genuinely want to pay for. If it can't do that, it needs to die out too.
When commercial content providers (newspapers, magazines, radio and TV etc) moved on to the web, they naturally brought their ad-funded business model along with them.
That's debatable. It's worth remembering that before the Internet, many traditional forms of media had multiple income streams, of which advertising was only one. Would it have been possible to produce TV and radio content based on a subscription-only model? Seemed to have worked out fine for the BBC. Newspapers and magazines would have taken a hit, but if revenue was based on sales alone then it's certainly possible some of those institutions could have survived on this.
In other words, it's not a case of working with zero money it's a case of working with less money.
If you're going to reply, at least consider the context in which the comments were made. The original point I was responding to was that subscription models only work in state supported media outlets. My assertion was that Sky proves that subscription models are possible outside those restraints.
Furthermore, even if there was a case where a company was not supported by the law, subscription models can still exist. There are examples online of subscription services for illegal content. One could argue that Usenet subscriptions in the broadband era fall into this category, the chances that people are currently paying a monthly fee to access the discussions is somewhat slim.
Subscriptions can work, but usually that's only for small quantities of high-value content, aimed at specialist audiences.
Go to your local stationer and find out how much it would cost for 200-300 sheets of high quality paper, then ask a printer about the cost of printing content on them.
Now if only the other billions of people on this planet felt the same way.
That's why I don't like this sentence. Every time the topic of ads come up here or on reddit, people always say "I'd pay for high quality content". And it gets upvoted, dozens of children comments of people agreeing with them, and everyone pats themselves on the back for such an easy and obvious solution.
Unfortunately, that's simply not the reality we live in. The vast majority (95% or more) of internet users would rather have their content subsidized by ads than have to pay. This has been proven time and time again by the countless subscription model failures over the last decade. Sure, some sites have found success, but those that do are the extremely rare exceptions, not the rule. And none have found fantastic success. How many subscription model websites are in the top 10? Top 100? Top 1000?
Subscription models just don't work. Nuff said, really. There's 10+ years of data to back it up.
I'm not disagreeing with you, but that still doesn't refute the argument that you're selling your audience to someone else without their consent (and before you say "then don't use the site", you don't get to choose whether or not you're exposed to the given sites ads until you go on it, in which case it's already too late. Unless, of course, you use an ad-blocker -- which is why I'm of the opinion that people should use ad-blockers, but I disagree with the article in that I feel there can be cases of responsible, acceptable advertising. Things aren't so black and white, from either side)
You watch the big bang theory and they play an ad during the commercial break for colgate. Did you get sold something without your consent? It's literally the exact same thing.
When you browse the web or when you watch TV, it's inherent to the media that you will see ads and that ads subsidize that content. Admitting to anything else but that inherent truth is (to me) just technicalities and/or pointless pedantry. Unless it's your first time on the 'net, you understand ads subsidize the content you see. Pretending like it's some injustice is almost laughable. It's like you're saying commercials on TV are taking advantage of you every time they cut to a commercial break.
So literally not the exact same thing.
I think advertising is one of the lowest, most pernicious forms of psychological manipulation out there. It simply cannot be done in good faith, by definition.
Some content creators even try to level with their audience about it and say "I'm just putting up this ad to get paid, just ignore it (or click it but don't buy anything) if you want." That's not dealing with the advertising company in good faith.
To me, the only good faith relationship between content creator and audience is the patronage model. This model has endured for centuries and some of our culture's very best artists have relied on it.
That aside, the crucial difference is still this:
TV ads cannot be removed. If they could be, they would be.
Since online ads can be removed, and since doing so provides an enhanced user experience, and since (passive or not) online advertising facilitates the gross pollution of the internet by financing endless numbers of splog, malware and other content-free junk sites, that nobody would ever pay for directly, why not block them?
And facts are -- nobody is indebted to companies who snuck themselves in the content we're interested in. I didn't ask for them there. Did I sign a contract mandating me to not use ad blockers? No. Your move then.
What's so hard to comperehend here?
- Taxpayer funded television (ala BBC)
- Direct viewer funded television (ala PBS)
- Subscription television (ala HBO, Netflix, etc.)
- Television subsidized by some organization that doesn't advertise but wants to produce content (probably doesn't currently exist, but could)
- Community produced television (ala cable access)
- Any other model you'd like.
Just because the current model exists doesn't mean nothing else could work, and doesn't mean that I should assume anything when I turn on the TV. There's nothing inherent about advertising.
But "books" are on a higher shelf compared to the "content" that people consume mostly out of restless boredom, for which they perhaps are reluctant to pay because they don't really care about it that much anyway.
If there was a single vendor who knew my payment information and transparently and simply just made it all work, I'd be far more likely to consider paying for one article here, one article there, etc.
People will pay large monthly bills to read stuff on the Internet -- they do so today to their ISP. But for a variety of reasons, no one is going to pay 750 individual monthly bills for $0.06 each to all the different pages they've stumbled through during the month, even if it works out to be about the same amount of money.
On the other hand, I gladly pay $5 through the simple checkout thing on LouisCK.com because I trust and respect him and want to support his business.
This is kind of why I'm so lukewarm about the idea of micro payments. It seems to assume a world where everybody gives tiny tips to little blobs of semi-worthless generic content that they probably consume on the bathroom.
I've paid for downloads of independent ebooks too and would happily do it again. If payments are really tedious then that's a general problem and, like, Stripe could just make a browser extension to make it utterly trivial. VISA works pretty well after all, no?
For me, the overwhelming problem seems to be that I'm only genuinely interested in a small subset of high quality things (books, videos, articles) by people I have real respect for.
With most news articles, I'd pay for the privilege of never even hearing about them. But if someone made a plain text newsletter with coherent, intelligent news commentary, I wouldn't think twice about filling out a Stripe pop up for that. I've paid for dumber things in my life.
What's really needed is a workable, simple, micropayments model where users can pay just one monthly fee and the sites they visit are compensated automatically.
(And, as an incorrigible cynic, I always wonder whether comments like mahranch's are made by people with a vested interest in the online advertising industry. They certainly wouldn't stand to benefit if the Internet switched to micropayments.)
Thing is, if sites are automatically compensated once users visit how does that change the motivation away from click bait?
I think it's up to the user to avoid click-bait. Possibly, knowing that they're directly (or very nearly directly) paying for visits will make some users think twice before following a click-baity link.
But TBH, I'm not convinced people in general hate click-bait as much as people on HN seem to. People buy magazines like National Enquirer, which to me are the print version of click-bait dross.
Just that? "People", "Cosmo", "Men's Health", all the most succesful print titles are hardly better than BS clickbait...
Just need a way of putting a little real money into some service, and then painlessly transferring a little of it into sites when they ask for it (and I want to pay it). "This page costs x" or "stream y minutes of video for x" or "24 hour access to this site for x" etc.
Sometimes the solution is out there but it's not been made simple enough or is not adopted by enough high profile sites or whatever. There's flattr, a popular one, apparently, although I've never actually seen it used in the wild. You'd need a paywall but where the wall is only a few pennies or a fraction of a penny high. My objection to a paywall is not the need to pay, but the need to sign up for a site ("great, another site i have to trust with my credit card details") and the high cost ("you want £20 now for a months access? I only want to read 1 article"). You'd not buy anything in a real shop if you had to pay up front, in each shop, separately, before you'd even decided you wanted anything from that shop.
Now you might say very few people would pay for it, but if we assume something like flattr, then your money is already spent. All we are talking about is who gets the booty. And if you aren't a flattr user, then you just get an excert and a signup button.
That version kills click-bait, because who really likes those kinds of articles?
Average CPM on a banner ad is $2.80. Let's say you can replace the four most obtrusive banners on pages by out bidding advertisers at a $3.00 CPM. Each pageview then costs you 1.2 pennies.
Of course, CPM's are going to vary wildly depending on the site, but the ad networks can determine this stuff easily enough and you could set your own CPM threshold.
A bidding war could be a scary scenario, but ultimately advertisers will be battling ROI as well and likely lose in the face of new competition.
For those who don't know, Contributor's "thing" is that you pay anywhere from $1 to $15 per month to google, and they basically "bid" in ad spots for you. If you win the bid, then either the ad is removed completely, or a custom image/pattern/element is shown there instead.
Plus it gives you a rundown of where your money went each month, with site-by-site control (you can say only use contributor on these sites, or you can say use contributor on all sites except these). And at the end of the month if you haven't used your entire "contribution" of money, you get it "refunded".
Originally your contribution wasn't refunded, so if you "pledged" $5 a month and only visited a few sites, google kept the rest. They have fixed that, but i don't think they've made any "relaunch" posts or anything. Maybe they are planning something else before that?
Also it doesn't solve the issue of tracking scripts, so many people won't even consider it, and they are very vocal about it.
Oh, and it only works for google ads. So sites that don't use doubleclick or adsense aren't included.
You've described a multi-site subscription rather than micropayments. Something like this could work if enough quality sites signed on. I'm not going to pay Wired $4/month. (Heck I think I only pay something like $1/month for the magazine.) But I might consider paying $4/month for a subscription covering a wide range of content.
One problem then is that you're putting loads of content behind some sort of paywall. Which means, among other things, that every time someone shares a link of HN for example, people complain. You do some variants of this with digital magazine subscriptions for example, but none of them have taken off.
In addition, if this approach really succeeded at the broadest scale, you're effectively talking about making a large chunk of the Web subscription only.
True micropayments have their own problems. A lot of people have taken a run at this going back to Web 1.0. The transactional friction associated with getting someone to plop down that penny or nickel to read just seems too great--in addition to the issues with a cross-site subscription.
That's because magazines are heavily advertiser-supported, the very thing you're trying to not have online.
Meanwhile, the vast majority of the world will simply look to any free source of news or information or whatever else that they can get.
And if everyone becomes part of a subscription model, it then leaves a gap in the market for whoever is willing to offer their services for free as a loss leader. As long as at least one person or organisation is willing to offer their services for free (even as part of a short term plan to get a large audience behind them), a subscription model will remain non viable for most sites and publications.
It's quite amazing that the 6 years old flattr (https://flattr.com/) didn't emerge as the solution
That's because we need a platform, not per site subscriptions. They have a quite succesful such platform in the Netherlands from what I've heard (for their local media).
Spotify, Rdio and the rest absolutely work -- and it's a similar model, only in this case the "mediator/platform" should be neutral.
Is it the Correspondent? Does 40K members paying 65euro/year, and their achievements doesn't sound that differentiated from what is available on the web, for free(although it might take a bit of effort to filter) [1]:
"we broke the news of a major European bank’s involvement in illegal land grabs in some of the poorest regions of Europe; in another piece, our Technology and Surveillance Correspondent warned readers about the security risks of using public wifi networks; and our Hacker Correspondent demonstrated why you might want to think twice before posting photos of your children online. With these and other stories, we strive to provide readers with new perspectives for understanding how the world works."
Reading the rest, it seems the major reason for their success is their "expert community " and the access to that you get via subscription - altough i wonder how do they compare to other web based communities.
[1]https://medium.com/de-correspondent/dutch-journalism-platfor...
No, it was an aggregator, not a news outlet itself.
Can't find the original article I've read about the service, but it seems it is this:
https://launch.blendle.com/
That said, 40K paying members for something like this, considering the Dutch population is quite an achievement. That would be like 1 million people in the US.
But still, this Correspondent thing is nothing like what I described (and think will work as a solution) which would be an easy to pay, ad-free, aggregation platform.
But(from an article in business insider): "It may well be that Blendle has been so successful in the Netherlands because the publications that have signed up have been Dutch language, rather than English, in which articles are often replicated hundreds of times over. But Klöpping[the founder] believes the Netherlands is no different than any other country"
I'm from Israel, a country about half the population of the Netherlands. And there's a really small amount of blogs worth reading and a small amount of indie newspapers/magazine like sites - so most of the time when i do read in hebrew, i use maybe 2 of the large sites.
On top of that, if you want to replicate content in hebrew, you're probably an Israeli, you have more lucrative jobs. But many poor people in the third world do know english pretty well, and the english market is bigger, so there are enough people willing to do that job,
So the situation is very different. But sure it would be interesting to see how the u.s. expansion goes.
EDIT: one thing though - i see their most popular piece is an in depth analysis of how will middle east will look in 2035. Seems like something that might not fit ad-based content(it's too long, making it both hard to copy well, and not fit for ads, and also credibility of the author matters). Now i really want to see what kind of content this produces in english.
Depends on the country I guess. I'm from another small country in the area, comparable to Holland in population, and we have tons of news sites (commercial) and lots of blogs. That said, we also had in the past 3 decades an overabundance of print outlets, so we might not be that typical.
If something behind the scenes automatically took my $0.50, kept track of the fact that I was entitled to read it on any device and browser I might use anytime in the future, and didn't bug me about it ever again, then it might be workable. I don't have a problem paying a few cents for an article. I have a problem manually entering into the transaction to pay a few cents every time I want to read an article throughout the day.
Ads of today don't work, the widespread and increasing use of content blockers back it up.
Netflix is the only streaming service seeing some success, and they don't own or produce most of their content or the delivery systems. If they did, their business wouldn't be viable either.
What exactly is meant by Netflix not owning their delivery system? That seems like a rather specious argument. HBO GO, Hulu, MLB, Sling TV and the 100s of other OTT services seem to be missing from your industry understanding.
Industry observers see the financial numbers from Spotify filings in the UK and Luxembourg and can piece together that they spend more than they take in. Another source of information about Spotify health was the Sony email leaks[1] revealing the unfavorable terms to license the Sony music catalog.
Lastly, CEO Daneil Ek has been on record[2] saying, "we believe in the business model of Spotify, and believe that ultimately we’ll become profitable at some point..."
It is not wild speculation that Spotify is losing money.
>How about Pandora Radio? They have about 80M users; is that a failure?
Pandora is also still losing money.[3] Whether it's 80M or 800M users, it's a failure if the business can't turn a profit. (Otherwise known as costs exceeding revenue.)
The overwhelming "costs" in both music streaming services is the royalty payouts for licensing music. So far, not enough people can be convinced to pay $9.99/month. Or, the people that are willing to pay something-per-month are not willing to pay higher amounts such as $19.99.[4] So far, the financial numbers are not working.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sony_Pictures_Entertainment_ha...
[2]http://www.theguardian.com/technology/2015/jun/07/daniel-ek-...
[3]http://www.techtimes.com/articles/98853/20151026/pandora-con...
[4]https://support.tidal.com/hc/en-us/articles/201745891-How-mu...
There are plenty of public reports of Spotify revenues and losses that show they're having trouble. Pandora has had continual losses and the stock isnt doing well either. There's only more drama coming with artists and studios demanding more money so it's a very tough market and isn't going as well as it might seem on the surface. User counts don't matter if the business can't sustain itself.
> What exactly is meant by Netflix not owning their delivery system?
Traditionally there were cable companies that owned the delivery infrastructure and studios that produced the content. Netflix is neither (although they're getting a little into the production business). They will continue to feel pressure from both sides as the traditional companies start to compete much more strongly with digital offerings. Regardless, if Netflix was actually producing all the content they have, they wouldnt be in business today.
My point in response to the GP reply is that subscriptions aren't easy. Netflix and Spotify were named but both have issues and arent clear winners. Leasing content doesn't show the true cost of that content and while it might work for audio/video resellers, it's not going to help all the major web content/news publishers.
Sure, but that's just a growth phase, right ? Once Netflix becomes fully global(and as successful it hopes), won't it revenues fully support the content ?
There were disconnects between how they viewed subscriptions vs. what I wanted:
* They offered access to all of their content for a price that would have been fair if I would be reading some significant fraction of it. But I wanted to raise my cap from X stories/month to 2X stories per month and have it cost something reasonable. Or something close, like 5X stories. They need to get over the idea that the way people read news today is by going to a single site and reading through a fair amount of it, like people used to do with a physical newspaper.
* The subscriptions were for what I'd call "odd" time periods like 6 weeks. WAT. Why not 5 or 7 weeks, or multiples of 10 days? What happens when my 6 weeks is up? I start getting renewal emails? Quit messing around and quote a recurring monthly rate with discount for longer commitments.
Anyway, I went there intending to give them some money even though I only occasionally go over the free limit, and left without signing up, slightly bewildered.
The subscription model has worked for 20 years in the adult industry, even though free online porn has existed since the invention of the GIF.
I'm willing to pay for high-quality content, it's just that whenever a "pay" option is offered, it's usually overpriced. The standard Netflix subscription costs ~$10/month; the online subscription to Wired costs $4/month. Is accessing a single random website (Wired) worth 40% of Netflix to me? No, not really. Am I going to spend hundreds of dollars a month to individually subscribe to every website I use? No, I'm not doing that either.
Add to that that I'm extremely wary of subscriptions for obvious reasons.
I'd gladly pay for content if I could subscribe to most websites I use with a single service at reasonable prices (or better yet, buy credits/access-triggered weekly passes for them).
Anybody asked them?
he said and looked at his torrents
There's a reason why NYT is so expensive (and, of course, still carries ads) per month compared to what one might think
This is actually what I do for myself, have over 300 sites which i visit semi-occasionally, that have disabled ads because I like those websites and those ads are actually something worth my connection, a nice way to pay out to the website. If AdBlock had done this, I really believe it would have been so much better than as it is right now.
The reason is simple, I no longer read a particular newspaper, I read whatever I get linked to on twitter, hn or facebook. Somehow newspapers don't seem to get this.
So even if there may be a need in money, maybe it would be better spend on solving those problems first ?
Consumers have the right and ability to completely destroy this business model and should exercise it, sooner the better. Most companies compete by stating prices on products, it's absurd that a select few get to state prices in long ToS and/or privacy policies that we know nobody reads.
It doesn't matter one bit if it's a mom-and-pop store or a tech giant that goes out of business because people are fed up with tracking, malware, and advertising.
Can we stop with the repetitive anti-advertising FUD, please?
I agree that this _is_ ridiculous. The fact some ads are OK doesn't mean the pool isn't poisoned and users are done with it.
The so-called "other ways of funding" are paywalls. If every blog, YouTube videos, online newspaper, start-up, etc, were behind a paywall, people would just nope out because it wouldn't not worth it, at all. Disabling ads wouldn't result in other ways of funding, it would result in people not working on creating content because they wouldn't be able to make a business out of it.
On the other hand, and for the same reason, content creator shouldn't complain that people block their ads. We don't need to visit your site, we don't need your content, it's a bonus. We don't care whether you make money or not. You chose not to make a paywall (and that's probably a good idea since nobody would pay) and hand over your content for free bundled with ads. We can technically cut out the ads. If you don't want us to do so, make them so that their annoyance isn't worth the effort of cutting them out.
Until that math changes, ads will prevail.
Except it's more of a butterfly effect than people realize. Not just "article" type content, but also innovation. I doubt sites like reddit would exist (at least in their current form) without ads. Hell, they barely get by with ads. Google wouldn't exist without ads, etc etc... Sure those sites exist now, and you take ads away, they're already entrenched, but what about the future google or reddit or facebook?
A lot of innovation has been spurred from people's passions and their hobbies, but much more innovation has taken place as a result of people trying to make a quick easy buck. And that's what ads promise.
Everything from your favorite news website to your favorite android app wouldn't exist (or likely wouldn't exist) if not for ads. I don't think people (hackernews users) really have thought about how much innovation on the internet is directly and indirectly related to ads. If you actually stop and think about it, the complexity can boggle your mind.
I don't think people (hackernews users) really have thought about how much innovation on the internet is directly and indirectly related to ads
Both excellent arguments.
I'm perfectly fine with all of this pathological "innovation" finally going away.
In my experience, well targeted advertising is highly beneficial in connecting you with products you may want. I have bought a handful of things I never would have known about from Facebook ads. Good advertising isn't intrusive and isn't harmful, it's genuinely wonderful.
Every product I saw through an ad that looked remotely useful was either unactionable, critically flawed, overpriced or sub-par compared to the rival products.
For the harm to society, my go to example would be ad reads on podcasts. There will be products that the hosts of the shows have been personally using for a long time and happens to sponsor the show. Naturally the ad read will be overall positive, but if you followed the host for a while on other shows, it becomes clear that they are more or less stuck with the product for now but are looking for alternatives because of some critical shortcomming. It also means that any discussion surrounding the sponsor's field (other rival products, or problems occuring peripherically to the product) won't be happening.
Overall the more relevant the ad becomes, the more perverse effects it generates.
While I feel of often does, that's not the claim I made which was about the harm from when you are dependent on advertising.
If your product is only profitable as a vehicle for advertisements, there is a conflict of interest between your goals with the product and advertisers goals. As we have seen in many cases over the last half-century, eventually the interests of the advertiser take over. The slide of TV shows from having only a few commercials between shows to the current idiocy of literally having more commercial than show on some channels is an obvious example of this trend.
> In my experience
I suspect you're engaging in selection bias. Most people don't even notice costs associated with advertising, because they already have high tolerance. Try isolating yourself away from any advertising for about two months; I doubt you will look upono advertising so favorably after that.
I'm not sure I believe that, but I do believe a lot more pointless/useless/malicious garbage has been produced by people trying to make a quick easy buck than people motivated by their passion or hobby.
> Everything from your favorite news website to your favorite android app wouldn't exist (or likely wouldn't exist) if not for ads.
If making money from ads is the primary motivation for a site or app, then it shouldn't exist.
If they need to make money to survive they should charge people directly and honestly, rather than cynically whoring eyeballs to the highest bidder; if it's something genuinely worth paying for, people will pay.
So you're saying anyone designing a website or an android app needs to be creating their wares purely altruistically? And if not, their products shouldn't exist? Because that's essentially what you're saying.
Sure, some people create content or products because they are passionate about that particular thing. But those people are a tiny minority. Most people make things and create content for a paycheck.
Seeing it as anything else is a bit naive and idealistic. It's far removed from the reality in which we live.
This argument is simply a scare tactic employed by monopolies of every kind. "Too Big to Fail" banks say the economy won't exist without them. The MPAA claims art won't exist without them. Advertisers say internet content won't exist without them.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-LkWKvMCzqA
You're missing the point. You fail to grasp the scope and size of the reach that ads have on the internet. I saw what the internet was like before the masses arrived, I was here online back in 1995 and while the lack of ads was nice, "the internet" was a ghost town. Those sites wouldn't, couldn't exist without ads. Hell, google isn't a search engine, it's first and foremost an ad company. That's where 95% of their revenue comes from! Their search feature is just a vehicle to display ads. Literally.
> This argument is simply a scare tactic employed by monopolies of every kind.
Except it's not a scare tactic and it's not an argument, it's a fact. Even if it it was both, it doesn't make it any less true. Advertisements actually do spur innovation and there's tons of data and studies to back it up:
PDF warning: www.voez.at/download.php?id=1152
Allow me to point out that you have just posted this comment on the future reddit.
Or some facsimile thereof.
Hah, this place is not the future reddit. Not remotely close. This place has been around just as long as reddit and has never tried to be reddit. In fact, they work towards trying hard not to be reddit. This place is the old reddit. This is actually a lot like how reddit circa 2007 was. Reddit evolved, HN did not. Reddit and hackernews serve different purposes. HN isn't trying to grow larger like reddit was. Reddit became about community building while HN is trying to remain a tech oriented link aggregator.
I haven't started counting how many users are blocking google analytics. I'm less worried about the fonts because the designers have accounted for that and they downgrade to something that is acceptable (at least to me). We are seeing a decline in new users to our sites but college applications are up. I'd love to know if that decline is false and is just because google analytics is blocked.
I think it is time to put some code in and see what the real numbers are for ad blocking on our main site.
Fonts hosted at a third party can be blocked, but not as often as analytics services. You could simply host the WOFF files with your website. As long as you configure the webserver to serve these fonts with the proper caching headers, users should only request them once.
And there's no reason for your fonts to be blocked by an ad blocker. Just serve them from your own web server instead of a privacy invading CDN.
I’m not naïve to expect that a $50bn industry will just disappear. What I’d like to disappear though is the gazillion of sites that steal content from major venues and monetize through AdSense. Which begs the question why Google accepts them in the first place. In the long term I don’t think there will be tectonic changes in the adverting industry. If publishers start serving ads from their own domains the whole ad blocking thing will become obsolete, or we’ll have to think of more aggressive ways to block ads. I would though like to see some adoption of micropayments. For the time being no publisher seems to be heading that way, they all ask for ridiculous subscriptions of something like $1/week which if you read a couple of articles per month becomes too expensive.
The other thing that I also don’t like and I rarely see it mentioned, is affiliate marketing. I wonder if there’s a plugin to render affiliate links obsolete by stripping away the referrer part. I don’t like when sites become salesmen because it gives me the impression that the whole purpose of the content was to promote a product.
I don't mind ad pictures in magazines. The same should be ok on websites.
Im not sure what fraction of the Internet is paid for by ad-network revenue, but I really don't care if half the content on the Internet suddenly dies in a fire because their measly income from ad networks dries up. I'm happy with only truly free, properly monetized (affiliate links, proper sponsoring), or paid for content.
It's a lot harder to remove ads from TV so no one seems to think they are unacceptable, no matter how terrible they are.
Don't like the ads? Don't consume the content. Or at least treat adblocking for what it is: a hack made easily available to you by the Web. If you consider them as part of the content (which they are) you'll see that the argument for the entitlement to remove ads falls flat
No problem. I have stopped reading Wired, among others.
I think they do. And if it were as easy to strip ads from TV as it is for the web, you'd be hearing plenty about that too.
[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Commercial_skipping
I would disagree, as many others who do not even own a TV. Or people who record broadcast and fast forward ads. Streaming is huge. I go less frequently to the cinema, because I have to watch 20 minutes of ads (+trailers) before the actual movie.
If you gave me a journal, can you expect me to read it in full? If you had sent me a video, can you expect me to watch it without skipping anything? If you had served me a webpage, can you expect me to render it as you expect it to be rendered?
I do view ads as a part of the content. Whatever is served is the content. And I feel I'm fully entitled to control the UA that's rendering of any content (because it's my browser running on my machine). I make the tiny fonts larger, disable videos auto-starting, use "reading mode" if I feel like I don't like the design or contrast, and I tell my browser to render only what I consider necessary (by filtering out ads, social share buttons or whatever I don't care about). When I feel like my eyes are stressed out and I'm file with hearing some monotonous voice, I even dare to use TTS to read the content aloud.
From this viewpoint, ads are not something special in this scenario. It just happens that I find them anything from just unnecessary to maliciously noisy - so I instruct my machine to not bother to process those. As far as I decide about my machine's resources, it's fair - that's the idea.
That said, if someone had lost^W not gained money because I didn't do something they expected me to do - as long as I haven't promised (or was otherwise required) to do so, that's usually not my problem. One might say I'm ethically obliged to watch any ads bundled, but as far as I see, the opinions on the matter vary and I conclude there isn't any established "common sense" on this subject.
And, well, if some website owner doesn't like that they absolutely can ignore my requests - it's not like I'm entitled for their content: I've asked if I could get one, and they gave me some. Heard, Wired does this (I don't read Wired).
Netflix sends me highly compressed content that my computer must decode in order for me to watch it. I have though many times of applying a gamma curve to dark scenes or boost voice in some dialogs, but I never do it because it would be kind of hard and tools aren't readily available.
Ad blocking on the Web, on the other hand, is next to trivial, and that's why most people do it.
Stop supporting DRM and applying a gamma curve is easy (just give mpv the --gamma option). There are several dynamic range compressors that could be used to to the voice boost.
1. Tries to load a file called ads.css which is usually blocked in default installations of many blockers relying on Easy List.
2. It uses gstatic.com to check if acceptable ads are being allowed - gstatic.com is whitelisted by Adblock Plus, so we test for it and warn users that acceptable ads are being let through.
We're going to be updating the detection to detect use of other blockers.
I'm not that opposed to ads, but browsing without blocker frequently brings my Computer to a halt.
Doesn't Google offer a way to pay instead of seeing Google ads?