They should put open it up for free to reach the maximum audience, but to compensate for the lost revenue they could get a company to fund the article in exchange for prominently placing an image or text about said company ...
"Social networks are not the only medium allowing the group that advertisers most covet—the better-off with money to splurge—to wriggle beyond their reach"
I wonder what the median disposable income of people who use archive links to circumvent paywalls is?
This is nothing new but the article hits hard. I don’t want to live in a world where everyone is after my attention but a good chunk of the economy seems to depend on it. There has to be a better future than this?
The solution, at least for me, is finding things/places, both on and off the computer, where you can avoid having your attention stolen and just focus on something you like. I think the ad-saturated parts of the world are one of those things that you don’t really need, you just get trapped by them if you open yourself up to being swayed by them. Nobody is in my kitchen trying to sell me shit when I’m cooking, nobody is on my bike ride grabbing my attention, and at least for now, my DAW is safe
The challenge highlighted in the article is that adds are increasing in areas that are harder to avoid such as billboards, hotel rooms, airline seats, ride-hailing apps.
Billboards? Is that a new thing? Airline seats? First-time ryanair flyer? If you're determined to never see an ad in your entire life, that was never possible, but if you just want to spend a lot of time without seeing ads this is just as easy as ever.
"without seeing ads this is just as easy as ever."
No. It. Is. Not.
The problem is you've internally moved the goalposts on what you consider an ad, from what would have more historically been considered an ad.
Those clothes with a big nike swoosh on them, those are ads. Individuals wear ads around everywhere. Objects are covered in their own advertising. If you have any electronics on you, god only knows what metrics they are collecting. Hell, these days if you're with anyone else that has electronics there is a non-zero chance those devices are spying on and tracking you.
Eventually those places will be premium real estate for ads. Some one will find a way to bring ads to our kitchen or to mount fiji. Maybe they will fly planes overhead, or do crop circles, put put them in hiking trails.
I once was at Miami Beach and there was a boat mounted with giant-ass LED screens riding by. Where I live, there's new electric "bikes" with large boxes mounted to them and 3 sides of the box display ads. People get paid to just ride this through everyone's field of view, or park it for a while at conspicous locations. I feel impotent rage at this increasing terrorization of the populace.
I mostly ride on back roads and side-streets, my city banned billboards and is very small and close enough to the woods to not feel like one. But I get what you mean.
This makes sense. City I am coming from haven't done this and the billboard/advertising agency is very close with the city mayor, meaning, all the (main) streets are littered with advertising. Everytime I come home for holidays (from a large EU city, mind you), I am overblown by just how many billboards are around. Crazy.
This is true, but I have to buy in to open myself up to it. Until they start giving away whatever VR headset it is, and until hell freezes over and I actually put it on, I’m safe. But the thought of it does make me sick/sad.
The Ted Kaczynski approach works until you want to engage with the world outside your kitchen and you step outside and realize that the dynamic (personalized?) billboards are now across from your apartment complex. And the local park.
Yeah I get what you mean. I’m not like, a luddite, or anything, I just don’t agree with the authors notion that advertising is particularly all-encompassing, especially when you’re not actively using a computer.
Is it just me or does it feel like this is actually a submarine article by WPP to kind of console its clients and tell them that it’s OK. Everything is OK and WPP is in control?
This is such a lame argument to make, because it could apply to an article about anything. Don’t agree with the analysis? It must be paid for by {insert lobby agency}.
Was there anything that was discussed that you disagree with?
Good luck with that. The ones that can afford an ad-free internet are the same group as the ones that can afford the product you are trying to sell. Promoted links, selection/ordering of posts and other mechanisms will be use to lead ad-free people to the ads, in ways that won't look like ads. It's like gravity, there are forces in play that will make things end in the same way.
You could argue that unless the $10/mo subscription offers a dumb chronological feed then it’s not really ad-free. On the other hand consider YouTube - you pay to remove the annoyance, not the algorithmic bias, and a lot of people are happy to do that.
Does anyone know why there doesn't exist a micro-transaction capability to buy one marginal ad-free item at a time? E.g. buy just this Economist article for $0.25 rather than subscribing for the whole month?
I know there are significant issues with micro-transaction cost but I figure you could set up a little token service with minimum cash-in and cash-out amounts (say $5).
Do companies like the Economist crunch the numbers and find that they earn by more by having paying subscribers as opposed to also selling per-article?
My friend and I thought about attempting a startup in this space but it seems so clearly useful and lucrative that there must be a good reason why e.g. Stripe doesn't already provide this service.
Also wish something like that existed.
I imagine friction of payments could be an issue. I would only use something like that if it was as easy as doing an Apple Pay transaction.
I'm guessing it's mostly a psychological thing. You make the decision to purchase a subscription once (and ideally for them, forget about it soon after), but if you know you're paying $.25 per click, you'll make a decision every time - and perhaps not bother.
Agreed -- my concern is that subscriptions are really negative in long-term expectation for the consumer, and companies are profiting off that and don't want to lose all the people who are paying $10 for only $4 monthly utility. My coworker hates the subscription era and pines for the days of buying a CD-ROM with software lol
Right. I've been a subscriber to Adobe's Creative Cloud for almost 10 years now - which means I've paid them upwards of $6,000 by now - even though I only use 3 programs (Acrobat, Photoshop, Illustrator) and even then I only really use base-level functionality that's been present in those titles long before they became subscription-only: if it weren't for (normal and understandable) platform-obsolescence (high-DPI support, support for new formats/codecs, etc) then I'd still be happy with a boxed edition of Creative Suite I could have bought for $1200[1] back in 2013
I haven't tried any of those suggestions, regrettably; as I've heard good things about them.
But it's not just familiarity, but also about compatibility: I need to be able to open my PSD/AI files going back decades with absolute fidelity; and I know one of the dirty secrets of other programs that claim to have "PSD compatibility" is that they just read the composite version of the image, instead of being able to import individual layers with blending/effects settings, etc.
Pay per click is also user hostile. We’ve all accidentally clicked on the wrong thing or, especially with touchscreen devices, clicked when we didn’t mean to. I really don’t need my misclicks costing me a bunch of extra money.
Agree, have been thinking about this for a while. Bitcoin on lightning could do it for really cheap if you had say a browser extension wallet or something you could do sub penny payments. https://yalls.org/ (not mine) already made a demo
All business inherently know that the most difficult thing is to get a customer to open their wallet. A subscription commitment is far more valuable than an impulsive/interest driven one time payment
Because all customers know that the moment you open your wallet, you're marked as a sucker and there will be no end to the appeals to repeat the mistake.
Credit card networks impose relatively high minimums - so transactions under ~$4 USD don't make it worthwhile. PayPal has their own microtransactions scheme (which is difficult to get approved for), I assume PayPal has enough clout to pull it off.
The other approach: having a PAYG balance, has the problem of requiring users to pay a somewhat larger amount up-front (e.g. $5 or $10) which is off-putting to people who've been burned by "use it or lose it" policies - and the difficulty of getting money back out again.
The Lightning network for Bitcoin was meant to solve the microtransactions problem for Bitcoin, but it isn't the early 2010s anymore when we (on-the-whole) were largely still Bitcoin optimists: Bitcoin as a "brand" for normal consumers is dead at this point.
One would hope that that because the major credit-card networks' processing systems are mature (as in, COBOL-mature) the fixed/marginal costs of processing transactions would only go down over time - so with inflation then we should see microtransactions become an affordable option, but that hasn't happened - I'd like to see some kind of pro-consumer regulatory investigation into Visa and Mastercard's businesses, but I doubt that's a high priority for anyone right now.
Unfortunately, a lot of American banking infrastructure is hard-coded on ancient systems, so it’s entirely possible that initiating a single transaction really has reached it’s price-bottom. That’s also why it takes 2 days to send money to people, in an era of instant communication.
Many companies (like Stripe and Venmo) mask these deficiencies. But when you have to do something like a wire transfer, you find that it’s all an “abstraction” over some really ugly systems.
I suspect that’s why there’s no institutional movement to build something better. It requires a ton of hard-coded systems to change, in lockstep…just so banks can charge you less? It would be like trying to change the entire US electric grid from 110V to 220V to reduce the cost of transmission.
FedNow was SUPPOSED to be the answer, but I haven’t heard a word about it since it was supposedly launched over the summer. Rumor is that no bank wants to touch the system even though it’s better…
Edit: After learning that FedNow IS getting taken up slowly, I guess the analogy is more like: FedNow is like a huge 220V line running through the center of the country, and all the banks/power stations have to run a line to it now. And maintain the existing lines at the same time.
For the pedants: Yes, overhead lines don’t run at either 110V or 220V, but I felt that made more sense than talking about changing from 60Hz to 50Hz
> That’s also why it takes 2 days to send money to people, in an era of instant communication.
I always assumed anti-fraud had something to do with it. Give the victims time to notice and the institutions the ability to reverse transactions without loss
> I always assumed anti-fraud had something to do with it.
The banks must have had a good PR campaign going because I was under this impression for a long time too. Something didn’t click when I learned that mistyping a single digit in an ACH transfer means your money is gone forever…
FedNow is helping a lot, but adoption takes time. The middlemen's APIs have to adopt it, test it, then the tools that use the APIs have to do their own round of that, then the businesses that use the tools that use the APIs have to design, develop and deploy the new features, then the users of the businesses that use the tools that use the APIs have to adopt those new features, and then you have adoption.
You shouldn't make up completely wrong claims to use as an analogy. The US grid doesn't run at either 110V or 220V, it's much higher. The 50/60Hz thing doesn't make any sense as an analogy either, because there's no significant advantage to either, it's just arbitrary.
You really should just delete your comment if you can't come up with a decent analogy, or edit it to eliminate the analogy that makes no sense whatsoever and makes me completely ignore whatever point you were trying to make. Maybe it's OK for some non-technical audience where they have no idea how electricity works, but this is supposed to be a technical crowd, isn't it? Or is it? Sometimes I wonder.
> You really should just delete your comment if you can't come up with a decent analogy
I think you're being unreasonable. False/untrue analogies still work as a rhetorical device and we can appreciate the point being made.
Pedantry has its place (peer-review of scientific papers, for example), HN comments is not one of them. This is how a community develops a reputation for being hostile.
(Now I'm going to feel horrible about myself for even letting myself be tempted to respond to a comment like this in the first place)
Damn sorry I offended you with my stupidity. Like many people, I have a limit to the things I know. Any ideas on what might have been a decent way to phrase that analogy?
Your comment was fine. It added to the discussion, and even if the analogy wasn’t accurate, it made your point effectively to a lay audience. So I think that is a net positive. Ironically, the reply to your comment by the poster you are replying to added nothing and actually detracted from the discussion.
I've been trying to find a bank that does consumer-level FedNow outbound transfers. So far, no joy. Many banks have receive-only FedNow - they can receive money, but not send it. The US Treasury's Fiscal Service, the part of the government that sends payments, is going to be using FedNow. So banks want to be connected enough to receive money faster.
There are some online services for companies that make lots of outbound payments. JP Morgan Chase and BNY Mellon offer that. But outbound FedNow at the consumer level, not yet.
Part of the problem is addressing. The clever thing about PayPal is that your email address is your inbound payments address. The banking industry hasn't figured out the consumer-facing side of this yet. FedNow at the Fed level is about the same as ACH at the Fed level - just faster. You need receiving bank account info. There's a "request for payment" mechanism (i.e. a bill), but how does that reach consumers?
Singapore handles this well through their PayNow system, addressing can be handled by phone number, QR code, or entity ID. Obviously they didn’t have the same level of technical debt as the US did, but it’s possible to do this in a consumer friendly way.
This doesn't seem that hard to get around, with a bunch of $0.99 games and in-app purchases on mobile stores. iTunes did it too with songs, before Spotify took over. Seems like a simple opportunity for any payment processor middleman to just batch up transactions and run them through the CC processor at the end of the day/week/month. If the middleman doesn't want to, each individual publication can still just tally up your totals and then bill you each month.
The App Stores work-around that by invoicing customers once-per-month for all the accrued IAP microtransactions the user makes.
> Seems like a simple opportunity for any payment processor middleman to just batch up transactions and run them through the CC processor at the end of the day/week/month
That only works if there's enough independent publishers who agree to band-together and commit to using a single payment processor. I doubt this will happen.
> If the middleman doesn't want to, each individual publication can still just tally up your totals and then bill you each month.
It seems like a really easy middle ground is to just allow pay-per-article views on mobile, which already have batched microtransactions built in. But even that isn't a thing.
I suspect it isn't just a technical/billing issue, but a lack of willingness to pay the desired prices...
> It seems like a really easy middle ground is to just allow pay-per-article views on mobile, which already have batched microtransactions built in. But even that isn't a thing.
That would require users to install an app in order to take advantage of IAP (which then means losing 30% of the revenue to Apple or Google). People aren't going to install an app just to view (and pay for) articles on whatever blog-host the writer is using.
It is the fate of any (and every) "Viewer app" to turn into a web-browser, and a sub-par one at that.
I dream of the day that I can pay 0.25 to read just one WSJ or NYT or WP article that I found interesting. I think they don't want to do this though. Not because it is not possible.. but because they prefer that I get the whole darn thing AND consume the ads (or at least that's what they tell their advertisers).
They prefer me to get that $10-30-50 monthly and not use it (as I will only be actually reading 3-4 articles per month).
There have been various attempts to do this but no network effect has been large enough to make it work. And by network, I mainly mean you’d need a network of popular sites to get it started.
They probably have some success with the subscription model, because there are probably people who want to read the Economist to get a competitive edge in their business (owners, investors, etc.) They probably haven't even considered that most people who bounce off of their paywall are not just cheapskate version of these owner/investor types, but are an entirely new class of user that they could monetize if they could provide the right payment structure.
This is a space that my company operates in and we will hopefully provide this service in the future. First, publishers want more than what consumers are willing to pay per article, the credit card companies charge too much (even with special micro pricing we've negotiated) and no one has a market big enough to reasonably get $xx per month into a wallet from a massive audience. Google had tried something similar with Google Contributor but has shut it down. There was also Scroll that recently got bought by Twitter that did a wallet-type of deal though it was more complicated than a flat rate per article.
I'm not sure if publishers could get enough from Brave Payments to make it worth it. Brave also blocks ads so they aren't exactly in the publishers' good graces. Some publishers would rather block Brave than try to work out a deal to accept cryptocurrency.
But it seems like one industry that has gotten this down is p*rnography? OnlyFans seems to be an enormous processor of micro-transactions for marginal content. Maybe people are just more willing to open wallets for that type of content?
It's interesting to see that even press "rebels" like Substack use a subscription model. You could argue this benefits writers with steady streams of incomes, and that per-purchase would incentivize clickbait and winner-take-all (not 100% sure I agree but could argue it).
The more I think about it, the more concerned I am that subscriptions are a psychological trick where people (myself included lol) overly discount future dollars and over-estimate their ability to remember and cancel subscriptions.
I think the answer is, that in sexual matters part of our brain is hardwired to attach to individual humans.
Subscriptions create an incentive to keep consuming a particular resource, you don’t need that incentive if your audience already gets an oxytocin/dopamin kick just from seeing your face.
The other industries that got that right are far more morally questionable than pornography:
Big Pharma and computer games.
> But it seems like one industry that has gotten this down is p*rnography? OnlyFans seems to be an enormous processor of micro-transactions for marginal content
The impression I've gotten from articles about OnlyFans is that the business model consists of a mix of monthly subscriptions and pay-per-view content on top of subscriptions, neither of which are typically priced at the levels that would be described as microtransactions. Is that not the case?
The main problem (and reason I cancelled) is that is doesn’t disincentivize clickbait.
If you could curate the homepage to only include feeds of publications you want to pay, then the incentive would be to create a good stream of articles.
As it is, I got sick of clickbait from a few big publications, so their fucking clickbait headlines showed up, but grayed out with a notice that I’d blocked them.
Also, the recommendation system recommends exponentially more clickbait if you click on a few clickbait articles, then it goes into a spiral of garbage.
Isn't Apple News Plus just subscription news? That's not really the same as pay-per-article, where readers (not the middleman) can choose which individual articles to pay to read -- kinda like how we have pay-to-read scientific journals, but usually at the $50/article range, not <$1.
> kinda like how we have pay-to-read scientific journals, but usually at the $50/article range, not <$1.
Most of the actual payment to read papers are from universities subscriptions funded by taxpayers money. And this particular example is why people will always be skeptical of this model.
Then, separately in 2012 they tried to launch "Google Wallet for content", offering publishers a way to sell individual articles for less than a dollar: https://9to5google.com/guides/peachpit/
I don't think either service ever took off. Probably people were just too cheap :(
I suspect that when presented with the actual "cost" of reading an article up front, most people realize that they just don't actually care that much about reading it. When the cost is indirect (via ads) and deferred (in terms of the effects on the entire system, leading to what we have today), it's a lot easier to ignore.
I am not the mainstream user, but a solution like that would have to come from someone other that Google, because it is 100% safe to assume, that Google would be mining my choices of what I want to read or would try to profile me or would put mandatory recaptcha on the pages or similar.
I think the Brave browser supports this. Give brave $10 then they provide small amounts of money to content providers. This allows money to pool up and avoid the astronomical transaction fees. I'm not sure how well it works in practice.
I don't want this - it creates very bad incentives around even more engagement bait crap except now I'm directly funding stuff that pulls my attention before I can even tell if it's garbage.
I prefer the substack or direct subscription model, there are risks there with audience capture leading to sometimes obscene results but it generally gives me more power to fund better quality stuff and removes the bad attention incentives of ads. If you find people that curate a diverse ideological audience that wants to give them a lot of intellectual freedom (or a specific niche) you can avoid the downsides. The quality of this type of media is far beyond any previous types imo.
Stuff Made Here, Persuasion with Yascha Mounk, The Free Press with Bari Weiss, Ben Thompson and Stratechery, etc. there are many examples.
The problem with most legacy media is that it just isn't very good, is getting worse, and it's getting outcompeted by better options.
It's usually because people tend to pay much less money then how much advertisers are willing to pay. Also, there's much less flexibility on customer price changes while advertisers are kept happy as long as they can have a good ROI.
> E.g. buy just this Economist article for $0.25 rather than subscribing for the whole month?
Because the real economic cost of an article is likely a lot higher than $0.25. The newsstand price of a magazine is always more expensive than what you can get it for in a subscriptio. Companies prefer recurring revenue over one-timers and their pricing reflects that.
Apple claims to offer tons of publications in Apple News +, but they don't tell you that a) Apple News shows ads and b) the titles they carry still block off some articles and content as premium-member only.
Anytime somebody offers a flat rate for something, you have to remember that the flat cost is simply what they offer to the customer, it's not reflective of what it costs them to supply. iTunes sold songs for $1 20 years ago, but for Apple the real game was using iTunes to get customers to stick around and make it easier to sell them their next iPod.
Blendle in the Netherlands tried it for 5 years (2014-2019), but stopped because they couldn't make it profitable. I don't think it was the news outlets complaining, but just not enough articles sold to make the margin they needed, so internationally this still might scale (lots more work contracting publishers, of course).
Afaik Blendle is now a subscription service with a flat fee all you can read model.
One of the Blendle founders described this as cyclical in nature. People get bored with paying for a lot of content they don't need, so they switch to a pay-per-item service. Then they get bored of the nickel-and-dime experience (and perhaps pay more than they anticipated), so they get interested in an all-you-can-eat model again. He pointed at cable TV as an example, continually bundling and unbundling popular content to either persuade people to pay for a bundle or to pay for pay-per-view.
I'm waiting for a smart content provider that has a 'never pay more' model. Stream a movie for 6 bucks, but since the all-you-can-eat bundle price point is 30 bucks, once you watch 5 movies, the rest are free for the remainder of the month.
You have a lot of great answers here but an additional issue is payments being an unconsolidated network with high trust requirements, which adds a lot of friction to payment in aggregate if not for everyone.
I would never bother to set up an account and then payment method to make the payment of 25c in the first place. I'd be trusting my information to a news network or some random syndication shop. Most everyone will be expecting an account set up, and then be using one of dozens of payment providers. It's just a news article, which these days are closer to blog posts.
I don't exactly want one payment network to rule them all either, so in general I think that is just a currently unsolved problem.
So besides the problems with transaction costs, there is the problem that the businesses selling these things would much, much rather have you pay a subscription than a one time cost. They would rather risk people willing to pay the one time cost not paying anything, then lose out on recurring revenue from a subscriber who might have preferred to pay a la carte instead.
Flattr did this, I saw a few sites with it enabled around when it launched, in 2010 apparently. If i remember you could click a link on an article that had it enabled, which was recorded. Then, weekly/monthly funds were distributed from a pool you had added to the service, to get around the cost of making individual micro payments.
Apparently it's now owned by Adblock Plus and is hooked in to their compensation thing.
The Economist costs $30 per month, which would be a 120 articles per month. I doubt anyone reads that much. I also doubt more people would pay the $0.25 rather then $30, due to mental transaction costs. I think to some extent this is also just a gym-style business model, where people pay for things they don't end up using that much because they want to be the kind of person that reads the Economist or goes to the gym.
I like to say that the problem with microtransactions is microfraud.
The cost of having a human investigate is substantial, and independent of how large the transaction is. There's also a substantial fraud problem in advertising, but consumers don't have to get involved with that most of the time. Until they're blocked by cloudflare occasionally deciding they're a bot.
This is not useful for the Economist as it currently exists. They'd have to charge a significant amount for an article so the engaging articles also cover for the 'boring' ones, and at that point you might as well get that full package. Which you can already buy at the store, or read at the library, but either way the entire edition is funded. The occasional $0.25 is nothing when they're looking for $209 per year from Americans or €300 from Europeans, the single issues are for the people who want to occasionally buy or gift it. The people only interested in single digit articles per year can already get given gift articles from people with a digital subscription.
I just don't see it happening. I remember the days of dial up internet - when I would be paranoid every minute I spent on the internet because every second I was online was costing more and more money. The sense of freedom I felt when I got fixed cost, always on broadband, was liberating.
Nobody wants to go to a system where for every single article you click on you have to go through the process of deciding whether it is worth the money or not.
Plus, how many times have you read some article, only to realise it was clickbait that did not really give you anything of use or substance at all; how much worse would that be when publications were literally trying to get you to part with some actual cash.
I'm also not convinced the economics would work. The reason paid print magazines are stuffed full of adverts is that the cover price did not cover the cost of publishing them. Even online, proper journalism costs quite a bit of money. Writers, editors, proofreading: it all takes time that needs to be paid for. If you pay per article, do those who worked on the article only get paid if the article actually makes enough back to pay them? Do the publications aggregate all the payments and pay everyone out of aggragated sales? If an author is particularly popular, how do they negotiate a bigger fee? These things are not impossible to sort out, but the economics of publishing would require a big restructuring and all these things would need to be hashed out.
A 'path to profit' is the time tested lifeline of any enterprise. However this is never highlighted as it doesn't bode well with the general social psyche of humans.
For last 20 years, tech enabled startups, chose 'postpone profit' strategy adopting 'free to use' or 'ad supported' approach helped by raising high capital to build moats around the target market.
Now this trend can be either seen as a moment where the moat is complete and 'path to profit' is through captive customers. (Or) a decline/failure of the 'postpone profit' strategy accelerated by the current economic recession.
All social media and any other free to use switching to subscriptions is quite a probability now.
An ironic thing is that companies that choose to postpone profits will find that when the time comes to charge for profit, they will have burned all good will, and people might finally be coerced to pay, but they'll pay any other company.
It’s so stupid because there already is a playbook for being profitable and still giving your product away for free. It’s the free trial. Hey, we want to earn your trust, so here’s a free month of the service. If you like us, great! Here’s the price at the end. Otherwise no hard feelings.
Instead, the playbook now is:
WE ARE FREE. YES, FREE AS IN NOTHINGBURGER DOLLARS. WE ARE BETTER THAN FREE! WE WILL PROMISE YOU ANYTHING YOU WANT! PUT ALL YOUR INFORMATION HERE AND WE PROMISE TO MAKE YOU FAMOUS AND RICH!
lol jk gimme that data. Also you’re locked in/addicted to our platform. Give us your money.
I resonate hard with this, and I'm glad it's being flagged as a trend. I didn't quite realize how soul-crushing ads were until I got rid of them. Now I'm on YouTube Premium and Twitch Turbo and look forward to getting rid of more ads.
Over the past 2 months I've switched from a YouTube Premium subscriber, to a regular logged-in YouTube user and finally to a no-account user. The increase in ads, particular transitioning to no-account; is staggering.
YouTube adverts have always been prominent and irritating but without an account they are downright aggressive. I think an 18 minute video I watched last night had a pair of adverts served every ~2 minutes.
I stopped Premium and deleted my account to disincentivise watching YouTube as it became a huge time sink and procrastination tool for me. My solution will either work because the ads make the entire experience unpleasant enough to not bother with YouTube at all, or I'll be driven back to Premium just to save some time.
Of course this is exactly the situation that YouTube wanted to engineer, and have succeeded in doing so, but it just seems such an awful way to incentivise subscriptions.
I also run this, and it's pretty worth it, but 40$ discounts the time, and makes it sound like the perfect solution. While it is good, it isn't perfect.
Genuinely curious what you do when a site asks you to turn off your adblocker? PiHole doesn't have an option to whitelist an individual site like an extension does. Do you just leave the site or do you temporarily turn off PiHole?
A lot of folks just temporarily disable their pi-hole. This happens rarely depending on where you hang out on the internet, I can't remember the last time it happened to me
Different options. Turn off pihole for that site. Or using something like archive.is or wayback machine. Sometimes just blocking the banner with ublock works too. Other times there are link previews like telegram quick view
What I do is toggle reader mode for that site if on mobile. That always bypasses it. I can also select the overlay on uBlock origin. If that doesn’t work I’ll disable JavaScript for the site since these popular need JavaScript. If all that fails I’ll simply not use the site.
I tried Pihole a couple of years ago, and while it did block every god forsaken ad, I had a lot of trouble with sites not working right, and the process of turning off the Pihole for that was annoying. Has anything changed since then?
IDK, I find the web interface pretty easy to use - you can whitelist stuff you need to use over and over again, and disable the whole thing if you encounter something one off with a single click.
The ads would disappear if people rejected the services and sites showing a crazy amount of ads. I haven't seen an ad for more than a decade because I curated my devices around ad blocking. I still don't understand the fight against ads. Do not use social media already and use adblockers for YouTube and Twitter. People do not know how to use the internet and still use the services which means they are okay with the ads. They are not bothered. It is not our problem to solve other's problems if these are not problems to them. Similar to cigarette smoking.
Ads are noise. Smarter noise will still sound like noise. Perhaps, making it even more obvious, the kind that irritates people.
Gradually, the noise took more and more center stage. And then, users were forced to silence the noise.
Blurring the lines of content and noise is completely backwards. Be transparent, place ads aside the content (not within it), and everyone will be happy.
Paywalls might work for some, but the key here is being ethical. Respecting the user.
The user will reward you if you respect it. It may even respect the brands that respect its attention.
As with everything, the problem here is greed. I wish more ads were respectful. I would take them more seriously if they were.
Doesn't this end up spiralling, though? As we've seen with Netflix, nothing stops the service from adding ads to a subscription feed.
Sooner or later the pressure to grow revenues is going to force Meta to do ads on their subscription accounts (especially since they can charge a premium on those ads). Then they introduce "premium" subscription accounts with no ads, then those get ads, then there's the "excelsior" subscription account with absolutely no ads, and so on.
Just one of the many reasons why I won’t let my kid use YouTube Kids and instead manually look up everything I’m ok with him watching on the main “Enhanced” site and watch it with him, then download the stuff he likes for use with VLC.
Recently I've noticed that the Uber app (which I grudgingly use instead of Lyft due to a decline in drivers over the years in various areas near where I've lived to the point where it wasn't a viable option most of the time) will show me adds when I open it to check the ETA during a ride. This is something where I'm not paying a subscription but literally paying for the ride itself, because I obviously don't check the ETA of anything when I'm not riding. I guess this is their way of trying to find a path to profitability other than self-driving cars, but I'd genuinely rather pay an extra dollar or two per ride than have an ad take up close to half my screen.
Things that are super time sensitive should never have distractions present. The Uber app trying to get me to buy cold upside down delivery food while I'm trying to get a ride is a terrible UX. Another example is Waze, the once most amazing map app ever made until bought by Google, has Jack n the Box ads (ok yeah I'm eating jack n the box right now, who cares!) overlaying my fkking map while I'm driving.
oh, tell it to the tram schedule app, popular in Poland.
You pay subscription or you watch unskipable ads. Very cool when you have 3 minutes before your trap.
And I am pretty sure just initializing the ads engine takes a half of a second or so.
Much worse with Indian Railways. The website is riddled with ads. And if you need to book an emergency ticket, the portal opens 10AM for everyone in India. Obviously the traffic gets too much. I keep the network tab open and its painful to see requests for ads hogging up the resources when you're trying to book an emergency ticket in a race against the nation.
Booking one ticket involves solving 2 captchas. They even tried to involve advertising into these captchas. You had to type out some specific detail from the ad to get past it.
oh, polish trains site is made by drunk students for a bottle of vodka... It is just terribly bad and haven't changed to the good side since like 10 years. They added some ads though and broke login for me during this time :D If you need to ride using several changes - just don't. You need to book each ticket separately.
German had a lot of useless steps.
Austrian was pretty good, but slooow to open initially. LEO express (Czech, but commercial trains/buses) was pretty ok but sometimes having bugs.
I am kinda surprised how painful the train booking sites could be :D
Have you found an optimal way to book Tatkal (emergency) tickets with higher success rate apart from paying private agents or paying a premium on ixigo app ?
Lyft started doing the same thing. It's slightly annoying.
Jet Blue is also showing mandatory ads on the video display in front of you. They last for around 5 minutes and you cannot turn off the display while these ads are showing. This is highly annoying.
I carry black electrical tape for all those eye-piercing LEDs on the hotel TV screens I never turn on - guess I'll add pieces of felt to cover seatback displays because I REALLY don't want my toddler blasted with that when he's actually going to sleep.
Now taxi cabs play ads on a screen directly in front of you during the ride, I've seen TVs playing ads in hospital waiting rooms... talk about a captive audience.
Complain to the FAA about it as a safety issue. I always do this when flight attendants are forced to read credit card ads over the PA. It just trains passengers to ignore the crew.
2043: you have been fined for having an unlicensed social activity. Please ensure all future social activity is properly arranged via Facebook groups or a registered chat application.
2053: your social credit score was decreased because of unlicensed social activity and dropped below an acceptable level. You were not fined and you still have a lot of money, but that doesn't matter, because you are not allowed to participate in any monetary transactions (in optimistic version: besides buying basic food).
2063: Your MetaFeed has not been accessed for 7 days in a row. Due to the inactivity, your MetaReality Bank account has been suspended. This is to protect all parties from potential unauthorized intrusion. You have 7 days grace period to contact our MetaAI Agent to reinstate the account by passing the EZ-Reverse-Turing-Test (v0.513) to prove you are a fully biological human. After the grace period, we will donate the assets held in your MetaReality Bank account to the NeoSingularity project for the benefit of greater humanity. In case you require financial assistance, you can always sign up to sell your brain compute for Meta Coins at the rate of 35MC/hour.
There are various groups that post popular stuff from one social media site to another, so this could be seen as a sort of piracy* I guess.
You can’t “pirate” Social Media’s original intended functionality, social interactions, because the content isn’t really the point. The connections are.
*I mean, if we have to misuse the term, which is actually about threatening to kill/killing people and robbing their boats, to mean unauthorized copying
Yeah, this is one of the problems with for-profit.
Even if the company could make the bottom line with only a subscription fee. Someone is willing to pay a lot for visibility, and they pay more the less other ads there is. So the paper/service/blog accepts one well paying ad. And nobody minds because it was just one ad.
But look at that money, let's do another ad, just once. But this isn't the first and only so they pay a little less. So maybe we could put in two ads, I mean they are relevant and nobody cares.
And suddenly ads are a commodity but you already have a ad-selling department and people willing to pay a little...
I mean I don't think ads are exclusively bad, but it's just the nature of the system that they will get worse until they are bad.
Large companies which have monopolies or near monopolies (Google with Youtube for example) will unfortunately likely go this way as they can get away with bullying users a lot before they are in any danger of losing market share.
Naive question, but when you sign up to pay for a service you are promised various functions or improvements, one of them is no-ads experience. If company then starts showing ads, isn't that breaking at least some consumer-protection laws?
I imagine it depends on what's in the terms and conditions. I expect companies structure these to provide considerable flexibility.
Plus, I'd guess it also depends on how you define what constitutes an "advertisement". For example, if Amazon/Apple/Netflix puts their newest show at the top of the "Featured" list, is that an ad? What if it is related to another show you watched? What if Facebook suggests trying a new shopping-related feature? To the company, and per their T&C, these may not be "ads".
> For example, if Amazon/Apple/Netflix puts their newest show at the top of the "Featured" list, is that an ad?
Yes, if you can't disable that feature. They're clearly pushing it regardless of my preferences.
> What if it is related to another show you watched?
Yes, if you can't disable that feature because they are most likely pushing the cheapest crap they can that keeps me watching.
> What if Facebook suggests trying a new shopping-related feature?
Yes, if you can't disable that feature because I can't tell if they're just trying to be helpful or steer me toward something with higher margins for their benefit.
I don't think any consumer-protection laws require a company to continue offering a service forever. They could surely stop the ad-free service and start a new service with ads.
But perhaps there are laws requiring companies to get explicit consent and not simply consider it a change in the existing service nor automatically sign people up for the service with the new terms (ads)?
I think there should be. I'm not a fan of companies changing their terms at will without clear notification. Clear meaning a plain English description of what's changed, not just "We've changed our ToS, read this long legal document again."
They're allowed to change the offering. They're not allowed to offer you one thing, but supply another. YouTube is currently testing their legal waters. They currently offer an "ad free" experience with the subscription of Premium. Despite this, they still serve:
* In-feed ads. These include ads for content prominence (preferential placement for creators), articles with link-out, ads for Google products and services like purchasing movies and shows in their store, and ads for Google product features.
* Modal ads in videos which they facilitate. That is, pop-up ads in content.
* Ads for merchandise under the content.
* Ads for paid subscription to channels.
* In-content ads in the form of creator sponsorships. These are becoming egregious.
The official app is absolute GARBAGE now. I can't even turn off shorts anymore. I'm on the verge of cancelling Premium. Once the Digital Markets Act comes into effect in the EU in a couple of months I'll be installing alternative frontends for YouTube which include SponsorBlock.
> Once the Digital Markets Act comes into effect in the EU in a couple of months I'll be installing alternative frontends for YouTube which include SponsorBlock.
this is weird. are we sure this is a thing in the EU? because the idea of having some sort of regulation forcing a private company to have their product offered by some other party raises so many issues. it's not like youtube is some sort of public good, it's a product offered by a private company.
who pays for the bandwidth, engineers, data centers? will the 3rd party pay for these things? if youtube is forced to break it's own TOS, and this leads to users moving away from YouTube but still somehow taking advantage of YouTube's offerings, why even provide the service at all, what exactly would be the point as the product would be loss making? and will capping access be back in the cards (we can't offer any more of these videos because it will cause losses)? and what about tracking viewers, how can we track these viewers when they're coming in from some 3rd party?
everywhere it's the same. the problem is that it makes no sense for a state entity to force a company offer their product via a 3rd party without taking into consideration the myriad of questions that arise.
YouTube is a monopoly and it's putting ads in its ad-free subscription. They don't get to hide behind "it's not a public good, it's a private company". Especially when they gained their monopoly status by operating at below-cost for years, preventing fair competition from even springing up in the first place.
> and it's putting ads in its ad-free subscription
i pay for youtube premium. never seen an ad.
> Especially when they gained their monopoly status by operating at below-cost for years, preventing fair competition from even springing up in the first place.
i fear you are thinking about a different product. youtube is not a monopoly and it's not preventing fair competition as TikTok is even bigger.
In general if Google is already paying for the engineers, etc to support their US offerings, then the EU can regulate their way into “paying” for the additional cost of supporting their users. Should be pretty cheap, no R&D costs.
If they go too far and Google leaves the EU market, I suspect nobody will be all that sad, goodbye giant competition, a boon for the local service providers.
I think what you are misunderstanding is: countries will sometimes be protectionist toward their own companies, but they don’t actually care if foreign companies have a viable business model, especially for non-critical things like YouTube. Asking the EU to care whether or not YouTube has a viable business model is not really reasonable.
Not showing the user ads is also only half the problem. As the article said, those who pay not to view them are the more valuable advertising targets. There's nothing about those plans, as far as I've seen, that says they're not still tracking usage patterns, viewing habits, etc... and selling that info on to others who don't have a paid ad-free option.
As far as I understand, the paid plans only opt you out of the ads but not the rest of the growth hacking bullshit that all commercial social media platforms do to some degree.
I don't really object to ads as much as I object to the tracking that comes with them. Ad-free services that still do the tracking aren't really much of an improvement in my book.
Are you suggesting Reddit is ad-free? It is not, at all. Using the official app or the website that is not located at old.reddit shows a promoted post every 5 or so posts for me. Yes, you can use old.reddit and not get those ads, but then of the content, I'd estimate about 1 in 10 or so posts on r/popular are native advertising.
Reddit is one of the worst and covered in commercial, paid content. Some of it is labeled as an ad, much of it is not.
I’ve been using ad blockers for years now, mainly on DNS level. Last week I decided to test Apple’s private relay and for 5 minutes I had to deal with internet with ads. Disgusting experience.
Not directly mentioned in the article (although this is essentially what the article is about), but it’s struck me lately as very dissonant that I pay for Spotify and Youtube in order to avoid the ads, and then still have to fast forward through the sponsorship and ad reads that the content creator records into their product.
It’s a fair price to get someone’s content, and I know the revenue from that is much higher than what they’ll get from the platform’s ad share. Yet still it is irritating. The majority of content I consume idly I would never pay for. So again, a fair bargain I suppose.
There are content creators whom I’d happily support directly for the sake of the value I ascribe to their content, not just to remove their ads, but they don’t offer the option. I understand there are many reasons for any given creator why an ad supported business model may be preferable/simpler/earn more. And maybe this is just a shift in the creator economy which is more slowly dispersing than I personally would expect.
But truly from a superfan or consumer point of view, I end up valuing the paid podcasts I subscribe to on Spotify which are ad free over many pieces of content that I arguably enjoy more but are forced to skip through their ads.
I’ve paid for Ben Thompson’s content for almost 10 years now, and listen to his podcast via Spotify. I remember when he said he’d never put his podcast on Spotify, but their private/paid feed feature got him to jump and Im so glad I got to delete an extra app because of it. I’ve been listening to the McElroy brothers’ stable of podcasts for just as long, but am irritated every time I have to skip through the ad reads. I do support them through the podcast network they are a part of, Maximum Fun, but I honestly pay less than I could because I know that it doesn’t directly support them (it supports the network which in turn supports them). That’s ironic because really I should give _more_ because of that fact, but the indirection makes me uninterested in paying much above the minimum.
I love both these podcasts, and their ability to monetize are clearly different based on the product each are producing. At the end of the day though there is (in my experience) a value add provided through Ben Thompson’s business model of directly charging me for the good.
Please don’t read this as a typical HN “why doesn’t the industry cater specifically to me and the very narrow niche I inhabit”, I’m aware of many of the incentives and challenges inherent in these different business models. But as of late, with so many content creators giving the option to pay them directly in exchange for ad free experiences, paying for an ad free service like Spotify but being unable to skip ads from the creators themselves has started to really stick out to me.
I don’t know what a solution would be, nor do I look forward to paying for the majority of content I consume. In fact Im fairly confident that there is no good solution exactly because nobody wants to pay for most content and people’s time is not free. In a world where increasingly folks are putting up paywalls for content consumers see as differentiated, it starts to look more and more bleak on the ad supported side of that wall.
Part of this issue is that most podcasts were designed to be free from the beginning, whereas music was always paid.
As a user, it makes sense to pay Spotify for music access, because Spotify, in turn, pays out a few fractions of a cent to the artist. But it doesn't really make sense to use Spotify premium for podcasts, when you can just download them directly or use various free RSS-based clients.
So why do so many people still consume podcasts on Spotify? 1. Because they're already on Spotify, so it's convenient, but more importantly... 2. Because Spotify realized they make more money if most of their users are paying, yet still consuming free (podcast) content. They don't pay out on podcasts per-stream like they do for a typical song. So ultimately, a premium user who consumes 100% podcast material is more profitable than a user who consumes 100% label-published music.
It's not a coincidence that Spotify has gradually taken over its homepage with podcast promotions, and promoted your "podcast library" as a first-class citizen, even placing it above your music library. It's all about profit margins, baby!
The article is effectively an ad[1] for the tech startup scheme:
1. “Give away” access to build a network effect
2. Get a network
3. Act with righteous indignation when some killjoy like the EU comes and says that you cannot just harvest whatever user data you want at will and users don’t opt to pay the proposed ransom money
[1] Presenting their worldview as just a given, something obvious.
They do require a certain degree of technical understanding, but the extension system on most browsers is fairly mainstream so I don't think it's for this reason alone.
Can it be as simple as the idea that almost all of media is universally disincentivized from talking about them? Of course there is a lot of content on ad-blockers out there, but the pressure may still be high enough to suppress cut-through to the mainstream. If that's the case it would be a nice example as to the extent of media influence more broadly.
This article is a case in point, where you would have thought that ad-blockers may have been relevant. And as a side point, perhaps also a good example of where you don't even have to be rich if you are knowledgable. Technical literacy is in itself a kind of digital affluence.
Modern internet is not in business of producing content and using ads as means of paying for said content production and delivery. Modern internet is in business of selling ads and is using content producers as means of keeping users in front of screens while ads are being shoved into their faces.
So, yeah, internet would be different, but to me it isn't obvious how it would be any worse or less in value.
I think the internet would be worse. No matter how you put it, the ads are funding content. If ads weren't viable, we wouldn't have a different kind of content. We'd simply have less content.
If there's a content business that can exist in this ad-free internet, it would already exist in the current ad-ful internet.
I don't know what kind of internet anti-ads people envision, but I'm afraid the whole thing is very damn fragile and rocking the boat will more likely break it irreparably than make it better.
Although "cookie", more like terror, banners show the immense list of advertisers if you have a slight misconfiguration in your content blockers. And newspapers won't even load more than a paragraph without an explicit consent cookie, unless you pay for every site, usually monthly. But at least in germany, not automatically recurring: they don't actually want to sell subscriptions.
If you’re on any social media, then you see ads. If you use any search engine, then you see ads. There are ads even on Wikipedia. You can see them even if you use all of the adblockers.
The repeating issue in these comments: very small fiat transactions are difficult.
Crypto solves this. The barrier to entry is cumbersome because of KYC, but after that the whole ecosystem is ready to go.
People talking 25 cents for an article. The ad revenue from viewing a single page with a few well sold ad impressions at $40 CPM is like 4 cents, and more often more like < 1 cent. I keep hoping to see Basic Attention token BAT get traction for exactly these microtransaction use cases.
Does it? Transaction times and transaction fees on some of the more well-known cryptocurrencies would seem to exclude them entirely.
There’s no particular reason that it has to be a decentralised cryptocurrency that operates in the manner required - preloading a few bucks here and there, which are transferred between accounts in small amounts.
As with many things that “crypto” solves, it is neither necessary nor sufficient. Some cryptocurrencies could form part of a solution. It’s not clear they bring any specific advantages to the table though.
Coinbase is famously expensive at ~5-10%. I use them but not for transferring much. Bitpay and Cash App are some 1-3%. When I could use Bitcoin with Overstock.com it was also minimal. But whenever bitcoin is trading heavily, it's not worth the cost. Hey why not put some ads on the transaction.
The last time anyone seriously considered crypto as money was 2016. Even Steam started accepting Bitcoin. You can see how it went for them [1]. Fraud, volatility, transation delays and fees were unacceptable. And that was the time before the total KYC pressure.
While some of these issues might have been solved (kind of), there's no way anyone touches crypto for end-user microtransactions with a 10-foot pole today.
To avoid generating many transactions you could also work with a classic custodian structure, i.e. prepay into your account once or periodically and it gets redistributed periodically.
Yes, or use a ZK rollup between the publisher and the client to collect transactions off-chain and then settle when it reaches an appropriate amount.
Or even better, have a ZK rollup between each client and a single intermediary, who manages ZK rollups with all publishers. Then you, as a client, don't have to worry about large amounts being trapped in escrow, and publisher payouts happen more regularly.
Welcome to a niche of the web, which is a niche of the Internet, of which wants all of your money pls. Oh? The fight (ad-free or ad-ridden) alone makes more money, because, "ad money or subscription money pls", which in turn equals more clicks for them.
You can argue, "yeah, but what about ublock origin (or another ad blocker)?" To you, they'd (speculatively) say, "ye are few, why bother."
This seems like a legal issue. There needs to be a clear definition of ads, then a requirement for companies to offer ad free options to their services with a clear, fast way to report offenders.
> the Norwegian Data Protection Authority strongly doubts that Meta's proposed ‘consent’ mechanism, often dubbed ‘pay or okay’, complies with the GDPR. The EDPB’s decision is therefore important to avoid Meta's infringement continuing while the company is exploring its options.
As far as I understand it consent must be given freely. Currently facebook offers two options, either pay or consent to tracking. In this situation consent isn't given freely since the option to not give consent requires a monetary payment.
There’s this local newspaper. While I’m on a logged in account (EDIT: paid) the ads seem to take up at least 25% screen real estate at all times. The best ones are the ones that graciously show up while scrolling, dynamically—it’s like wathing TV (again)! My favorite place though is the gym. Which costs a lot when you just go there to use frickin’ weights and cardio equipment. LCD screens with ads running (for local businesses—how nice and cozy) so that your peripheral vision gets distracted by irrelevant stimuli (for some reason I automatically have to look when it seems like something is “happening” all of a sudden, an urge I have to repress).
I wonder if this ad/paid dichotomy is some tech startup fairy tale. Like, [we burnt capital on building an effective monopoly]^W [gave away our product for free] but now the [entitled lusers]^W [users]^W don’t want to pay 10$ a month in order to be on a social network that mostly only their one-generation-or-older relatives are daily active on.
But is this not a fundamental problem if you expect everything to be available for free? For journalism, this has become an existential threat as web-users generate nowhere near as much revenue than selling printed paper.
Not only that, but back in those days, the ads probably generated the lion's share of their revenues, along with the "classified ads" section (which is also ads, just not so commercial). That $0.10 you paid for the paper only really covered the cost of printing and distribution, if that.
Unlike today, though, the ads in newspapers weren't annoying: they were just print, and didn't pop up dynamically in front of the article you were reading, and no one tried to shame you for not looking at them, unlike today's HN users.
Nor did they monitor what you looked at on the page, track how you "interacted" with them, and sell all that data about you to anyone who would give them a couple of bucks.
> That $0.10 you paid for the paper only really covered the cost of printing and distribution, if that.
AFAIK for most newspapers and magazines, the cost on the label was mostly there so that readers would feel like the publication was serious - differentiating them from the free papers which were clearly spam and / or propaganda
Yet, despite the newspaper being fully supported by plain, simple, black-and-white print ads (and maybe some color inserts later which were easily discarded), they managed to pay for serious journalists, and they didn't whine about how they need to track you and spy on you and force you to look at obnoxious pop-up ads to make enough money to survive.
As a side note, I figure I wouldn't mind web ads if they were non-animated black and white. Some super forward thinking ad agency should do this and set a trend!! ;)
Hard to say, nobody has managed to replicate the old IRL newspaper business model. You used to be able to get a subscription, or just buy a single paper from a store or a box. The latter is much more convenient, but the former was the only one implemented for the web.
For example, I don’t care to have a subscription to the economist, so I didn’t read this article. If I could pay like $1 for it, I probably would. But it would require a new service, I’m not going to make an account to pay $1, a good number of newspapers would have to work out a shared system before this sort of thing would be interesting.
Unfortunately the ad-net has sucked all the oxygen out of the room for this kind of business model.
What they need is to combine and meter. I.e. one $x0/mo subscription gets you access to a network of X newspapers, all with one log-in, no ads, and maybe coupons or some other perk. Then it gives you say 30 articles a month, and pays the publisher based on what you read. You're never going to get rid of freeloaders, so maybe have free-tier AI-generated articles and put thoughtful, detailed investigative reporting behind the paywall. Or (for the case of a local paper) have the free-tier not include photos, or grayscale photos, etc. Just tease them to pay for the real version.
Another way to monetize is to make it interactive and bring back comments. Allow a well-regulated peanut gallery for each article, but have it actively moderated, require people to use their real names, and set a high bar for what comments are even allowed. Have journalists actively engage with them. A comment will only be published if it adds value. Then encourage people to have spirited discussion about each article. And guess what, actively commenting will cost you admission.
I think a system of N articles per month invites these low-effort AI articles that you mention, and adds a huge inter-company political problem of policing what exactly a low effort article is. The incentive is to be the company that is engaging with the system, but putting in the least effort per article, while still passing the “worth money” bar.
On top of financial motivations, newspapers often have different political alignments for example, I suspect some of them basically hate each other; a system where they get along and engage in good faith is too much.
I’d rather see an account where you dump money in, the site can say “buy this article for $x”, and it asks your account for that money. It doesn’t even really need to be a centralized site, it could be an API that multiple services can implement, or whatever.
Apple’s podcast client has some ability to subscribe to the premium version of some podcasts. So they seem to have something vaguely like this. It still appears to be a monthly/yearly subscription thing though.
I decided to poke around the news app based on your comment, but I only see monthly subscriptions, sadly.
I get that newspapers want the reliable recurring subscription instead, but it just seems to weird to me that they were willing to concede to users and sell a single issue when the papers were, well, paper, but not digital. I mean it should be easier with digital, they don’t have to even make any projections about how many to print!
I mean yeah you can't pick articles ala cart from Apple News, but you can pay for one subscription to get access to a bunch of different news sources, and it presumably distributes your subscription fee (minus Apple's cut) to news sources depending on what and how many articles you actually read. Which is sort of like what you were talking about?
Oh, I didn’t realize that it was offering a single “Apple News+” subscription, I thought it was like the premium offered in Apple Podcasts.
That’s a little more interesting.
IMO an architecture that was a little more distributed and ala cart, as you say, would be nice. But it is definitely neat that at least somebody is taking a swing at this kind of solution.
With a little creativity it can work well. The essentials include an olympic bar and weights, barbells, squat rack, and bench. The upfront cost isn't too bad (maybe a few years worth of gym membership). The space requirements can be prohibitive. Setup can also be annoying with limited space because it can mean dragging all the equipment to another location to use, then back again to pack it up.
True. I purchased my weights before covid and was very happy the moment the lockdowns started here. Ultimately, I started my home gym because this way I have no excuses to not train. It's next to my computer and everytime I feel the urge to train I can do that immediately (not on a training scheme right now). Put on some nice music (without ads) and defy gravity, usually without changing to gym clothing (yes, they go in the laundry afterwards).
Depending on what you pay for a gym membership of course, I think I started saving money after 1,5 to 2 years (cheap gym membership compared to relatively cheap equipment at home).
I prefer public gyms by far but you can build a very capable home gym that fits under half a bed. Forget squats, deadlifts and bench presses and bring in unilateral variations at higher rep counts and you won't need much more than a handle and a pair of 45's for years.
I just measured the footprint of my home gym (only weights, a small bench and a pullup rack) and it's like 2 (two!) square meters. Take another 2 square meters for exercising and lifting, and I'm good to go.
Caveat, I parked my bench inside my pullup rack (don't have to move it before training though).
On a 1-10 scale of "difficulty to workout", I'm an 8 or 9. Most of my problems are psychological, motivational, ADHD/executive function related. Buying home gym equipment would do absolutely nothing for me because I would just stare at it and procrastinate.
I just started doing personal training, which is terribly expensive but it's one of the only things that motivates me to go. The other thing that helps is being around other people who are exercising, and in a brightly-lit space.
Finally, I wanted to share that doing personal training, we spend 70% of the time doing calisthenic-type exercises that require basically no equipment at all. So if someone has the motivation, do your squats, stair-steps, stretches, running, and maybe all you need to buy is a set or 2 of free weights (by "set" I mean literally two weights of specific values, not a set of all possible weights). Other cheap and small accessories are rubber bands that go around your legs, a mat so you can crawl on the floor and not get dirty, plastic frisbee-like plates so you can do leg stretches on the carpet. I know this is all "no shit" type information for people who work out a lot, I just want to share that for someone who wants to exercise for cheap, you do NOT need a towering multi-gym set to get started. There's TONS of exercises you can do right now if you just have the motivation.
Thanks for the reply. To each their own indeed. I had to learn to like it, and that meant I had to hold back and space out the input energy over multiple days. I used to go all-in once in a while, hurt my body and than not do it for a long time. The first year of taking weight training more seriously was really nothing more than using the same light weight, doing exactly one set for one exercise each day and just getting my body used to it.
A gym membership is a complete road block for me. I get distracted by women and that kind of thing. And I don't want to wait for available equipment. Besides I want to make the noises without people looking at me, or me thinking people look at me.
I'd even argue that internet, while it was seen as a counter-balance to the ad infected tv and radio space, has become WORST than watching a TV.
If I want to show something on YT to my friend, and I don't know exactly which video is correct, well lots of luck to me to find it in first few tries, as EACH video I click on will first show me a two unskippable ads, no matter how short the video is
Exactly right. Good luck using a for-reference video where you have to seek around a lot to exactly the parts you need. Have fun watching the same two unskippable ads every time.
Meanwhile (on TV) my parents just record the shows they want and wind through the ad breaks that come up on a set schedule.
One day we’re gonna have sandboxes that run through web assembly ad infested garbage dumps and then recreate it for you with ai directed obfuscated versions
Something went wonky with ads in general and it may just be a coincidence that the internet happened at an overlapping time. I fondly remember memorable, interesting and funny ads. It's like shittification happened on the quality of ads, maybe they got lazy because they could just target a specific demographic, maybe it's all the incompetent and lazy gen-whatevers joining the workplace, or maybe we're all collectively not accepting of ads anymore because of their quantity and pervasiveness.
Maybe it's because the technology has progressed to the point where any idiot can make an ad, so now ads are made by idiots. It's not the first industry to be so affected.
While the internet may have gotten worse then TV with ads, the internet being on-demand and interactive, and being mostly on computers instead of appliances, means you can skip/bypass 99% of the ads by using adblockers.
I refuse to use the modern web without adblockers, and have a very friendly media usage experience without ads. Every time I listen to radio in the car, or see TV at frieds or parents I'm amazed by the volume of advertisements being hurled at the consumer. In my own environment I never get to see all this crapware.
I'm in the same boat, but even worse than radio and TV is using a non-adblocked browser. I'd rather not use the internet than like that. I don't know how others do it.
Yea, I adblock the living hell out of my internet, so I am jaded, but I was at an older persons house with regular broadcast TV on and it was so much worse then I remember TV being when I was young.
The amount of actual show time seems to have dropped even further. The TV ads seem to be all gambling and drugs. It was pretty terrible.
> your peripheral vision gets distracted by irrelevant stimuli (for some reason I automatically have to look when it seems like something is “happening” all of a sudden, an urge I have to repress)
If you figure out how to do this, please let everyone know. I don't think it's possible. I think humans have it baked in to them to pay attention to, for lack of a better word, information.
I used to have a long commute driving along a highway with trees and mountains along the side and, some mornings, the sky would light up from the brilliance of sunrise. Billboards tracked the highway for kilometres. Billboards were always in view and somehow they were louder than everything else. Like, if you looked at an entire landscape and the billboard, with its clickbaity text, was an absolutely small area of your vision -- it would disproportionately occupy your attention and space in your mind. Just like how you can hear your heartbeat when it's very quiet. It's not gone when you can't hear it -- the quiet things are still there and unchanged but you can't experience them when something else is being loud. In the very same way you can no longer travel down that road and experience the joy of not being sold anything,
> If you figure out how to do this, please let everyone know. I don't think it's possible. I think humans have it baked in to them to pay attention to, for lack of a better word, information.
I agree, but more than that; if we would find a way to avoid paying attention, a more pervasive way of pushing the adds would be invented.
I observe this in myself. It's virtually impossible for me to be in a restaurant/bar that has a TV up on the wall, and really be present with my friends/family. I catch myself being drawn into TV content that I'm entirely uninterested in, drifting off, and I hate it.
Yeah your brain might be tuned in to that artifact that is projecting input which is unlike the expected environment and which is constantly changing. Oh news-cut to an explosion. Ugh.
>so that your peripheral vision gets distracted by irrelevant stimuli
As this becomes increasingly more common place, I'm left wondering if there is a risk of a reduced quality of life for those with neurological issues (ADHD for example), in the worst case their exclusion from society.
(author here) I’m sorry but this looks like fake news. :/ I visited the webpage again (it’s not every day) and there were barely any ads this time. Did I misremember?
I usually notice when I log in since I can barely click on any stories without getting told that it’s for subscribers only.
There is no world in which corporations will resist the temptation to serve ads to people who have demonstrated to both invest time and money in their platform.
Don't worry, you will only get the best artisanal premium ads, you will learn to love them [1].
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 259 ms ] threadI wonder what the median disposable income of people who use archive links to circumvent paywalls is?
And if that is a hassle my little hack to selectively view pages with js disabled works great here https://noscript.it/?p=0#https://www.economist.com/business/...
No. It. Is. Not.
The problem is you've internally moved the goalposts on what you consider an ad, from what would have more historically been considered an ad.
Those clothes with a big nike swoosh on them, those are ads. Individuals wear ads around everywhere. Objects are covered in their own advertising. If you have any electronics on you, god only knows what metrics they are collecting. Hell, these days if you're with anyone else that has electronics there is a non-zero chance those devices are spying on and tracking you.
I once was at Miami Beach and there was a boat mounted with giant-ass LED screens riding by. Where I live, there's new electric "bikes" with large boxes mounted to them and 3 sides of the box display ads. People get paid to just ride this through everyone's field of view, or park it for a while at conspicous locations. I feel impotent rage at this increasing terrorization of the populace.
What is that supposed to mean? There are plenty of websites that are not out to earn any money. It doesn't take anything for them to "survive".
Was there anything that was discussed that you disagree with?
That's around what I pay to the maintainer of the Mastodon server I'm on. And I get that nice dumb chronological feed.
Oh, and it's ad-free. For everyone. It's amazing seeing Ublock Origin with "nothing blocking".
The true ad-free internet exists. But it doesn't exist within the FAANG space.
I know there are significant issues with micro-transaction cost but I figure you could set up a little token service with minimum cash-in and cash-out amounts (say $5).
Do companies like the Economist crunch the numbers and find that they earn by more by having paying subscribers as opposed to also selling per-article? My friend and I thought about attempting a startup in this space but it seems so clearly useful and lucrative that there must be a good reason why e.g. Stripe doesn't already provide this service.
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20130808023019/http://www.amazon...
But it's not just familiarity, but also about compatibility: I need to be able to open my PSD/AI files going back decades with absolute fidelity; and I know one of the dirty secrets of other programs that claim to have "PSD compatibility" is that they just read the composite version of the image, instead of being able to import individual layers with blending/effects settings, etc.
The other approach: having a PAYG balance, has the problem of requiring users to pay a somewhat larger amount up-front (e.g. $5 or $10) which is off-putting to people who've been burned by "use it or lose it" policies - and the difficulty of getting money back out again.
The Lightning network for Bitcoin was meant to solve the microtransactions problem for Bitcoin, but it isn't the early 2010s anymore when we (on-the-whole) were largely still Bitcoin optimists: Bitcoin as a "brand" for normal consumers is dead at this point.
One would hope that that because the major credit-card networks' processing systems are mature (as in, COBOL-mature) the fixed/marginal costs of processing transactions would only go down over time - so with inflation then we should see microtransactions become an affordable option, but that hasn't happened - I'd like to see some kind of pro-consumer regulatory investigation into Visa and Mastercard's businesses, but I doubt that's a high priority for anyone right now.
Many companies (like Stripe and Venmo) mask these deficiencies. But when you have to do something like a wire transfer, you find that it’s all an “abstraction” over some really ugly systems.
I suspect that’s why there’s no institutional movement to build something better. It requires a ton of hard-coded systems to change, in lockstep…just so banks can charge you less? It would be like trying to change the entire US electric grid from 110V to 220V to reduce the cost of transmission.
FedNow was SUPPOSED to be the answer, but I haven’t heard a word about it since it was supposedly launched over the summer. Rumor is that no bank wants to touch the system even though it’s better…
Edit: After learning that FedNow IS getting taken up slowly, I guess the analogy is more like: FedNow is like a huge 220V line running through the center of the country, and all the banks/power stations have to run a line to it now. And maintain the existing lines at the same time.
For the pedants: Yes, overhead lines don’t run at either 110V or 220V, but I felt that made more sense than talking about changing from 60Hz to 50Hz
I always assumed anti-fraud had something to do with it. Give the victims time to notice and the institutions the ability to reverse transactions without loss
The banks must have had a good PR campaign going because I was under this impression for a long time too. Something didn’t click when I learned that mistyping a single digit in an ACH transfer means your money is gone forever…
You can see it in action. Plaid for example: https://plaid.com/blog/get-access-to-the-fednow-service-via-...
You really should just delete your comment if you can't come up with a decent analogy, or edit it to eliminate the analogy that makes no sense whatsoever and makes me completely ignore whatever point you were trying to make. Maybe it's OK for some non-technical audience where they have no idea how electricity works, but this is supposed to be a technical crowd, isn't it? Or is it? Sometimes I wonder.
I think you're being unreasonable. False/untrue analogies still work as a rhetorical device and we can appreciate the point being made.
Pedantry has its place (peer-review of scientific papers, for example), HN comments is not one of them. This is how a community develops a reputation for being hostile.
(Now I'm going to feel horrible about myself for even letting myself be tempted to respond to a comment like this in the first place)
There are some online services for companies that make lots of outbound payments. JP Morgan Chase and BNY Mellon offer that. But outbound FedNow at the consumer level, not yet.
Part of the problem is addressing. The clever thing about PayPal is that your email address is your inbound payments address. The banking industry hasn't figured out the consumer-facing side of this yet. FedNow at the Fed level is about the same as ACH at the Fed level - just faster. You need receiving bank account info. There's a "request for payment" mechanism (i.e. a bill), but how does that reach consumers?
> Seems like a simple opportunity for any payment processor middleman to just batch up transactions and run them through the CC processor at the end of the day/week/month
That only works if there's enough independent publishers who agree to band-together and commit to using a single payment processor. I doubt this will happen.
> If the middleman doesn't want to, each individual publication can still just tally up your totals and then bill you each month.
It seems like a really easy middle ground is to just allow pay-per-article views on mobile, which already have batched microtransactions built in. But even that isn't a thing.
I suspect it isn't just a technical/billing issue, but a lack of willingness to pay the desired prices...
That would require users to install an app in order to take advantage of IAP (which then means losing 30% of the revenue to Apple or Google). People aren't going to install an app just to view (and pay for) articles on whatever blog-host the writer is using.
It is the fate of any (and every) "Viewer app" to turn into a web-browser, and a sub-par one at that.
They prefer me to get that $10-30-50 monthly and not use it (as I will only be actually reading 3-4 articles per month).
But it seems like one industry that has gotten this down is p*rnography? OnlyFans seems to be an enormous processor of micro-transactions for marginal content. Maybe people are just more willing to open wallets for that type of content?
It's interesting to see that even press "rebels" like Substack use a subscription model. You could argue this benefits writers with steady streams of incomes, and that per-purchase would incentivize clickbait and winner-take-all (not 100% sure I agree but could argue it). The more I think about it, the more concerned I am that subscriptions are a psychological trick where people (myself included lol) overly discount future dollars and over-estimate their ability to remember and cancel subscriptions.
Subscriptions create an incentive to keep consuming a particular resource, you don’t need that incentive if your audience already gets an oxytocin/dopamin kick just from seeing your face.
The other industries that got that right are far more morally questionable than pornography: Big Pharma and computer games.
The impression I've gotten from articles about OnlyFans is that the business model consists of a mix of monthly subscriptions and pay-per-view content on top of subscriptions, neither of which are typically priced at the levels that would be described as microtransactions. Is that not the case?
The main problem (and reason I cancelled) is that is doesn’t disincentivize clickbait.
If you could curate the homepage to only include feeds of publications you want to pay, then the incentive would be to create a good stream of articles.
As it is, I got sick of clickbait from a few big publications, so their fucking clickbait headlines showed up, but grayed out with a notice that I’d blocked them.
Also, the recommendation system recommends exponentially more clickbait if you click on a few clickbait articles, then it goes into a spiral of garbage.
Most of the actual payment to read papers are from universities subscriptions funded by taxpayers money. And this particular example is why people will always be skeptical of this model.
In 2011, they partnered with some publishers to offer "One Pass", a pass-through billing system that also had an option for pay-per-article: https://www.electronicpaymentsinternational.com/news/google-...
Then, separately in 2012 they tried to launch "Google Wallet for content", offering publishers a way to sell individual articles for less than a dollar: https://9to5google.com/guides/peachpit/
I don't think either service ever took off. Probably people were just too cheap :(
------
Edit, at least 3 times, apparently! See fastest963's comment about "Google Contributor": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=38622362
I prefer the substack or direct subscription model, there are risks there with audience capture leading to sometimes obscene results but it generally gives me more power to fund better quality stuff and removes the bad attention incentives of ads. If you find people that curate a diverse ideological audience that wants to give them a lot of intellectual freedom (or a specific niche) you can avoid the downsides. The quality of this type of media is far beyond any previous types imo.
Stuff Made Here, Persuasion with Yascha Mounk, The Free Press with Bari Weiss, Ben Thompson and Stratechery, etc. there are many examples.
The problem with most legacy media is that it just isn't very good, is getting worse, and it's getting outcompeted by better options.
Because the real economic cost of an article is likely a lot higher than $0.25. The newsstand price of a magazine is always more expensive than what you can get it for in a subscriptio. Companies prefer recurring revenue over one-timers and their pricing reflects that.
Apple claims to offer tons of publications in Apple News +, but they don't tell you that a) Apple News shows ads and b) the titles they carry still block off some articles and content as premium-member only.
Anytime somebody offers a flat rate for something, you have to remember that the flat cost is simply what they offer to the customer, it's not reflective of what it costs them to supply. iTunes sold songs for $1 20 years ago, but for Apple the real game was using iTunes to get customers to stick around and make it easier to sell them their next iPod.
Afaik Blendle is now a subscription service with a flat fee all you can read model.
I'm waiting for a smart content provider that has a 'never pay more' model. Stream a movie for 6 bucks, but since the all-you-can-eat bundle price point is 30 bucks, once you watch 5 movies, the rest are free for the remainder of the month.
I would never bother to set up an account and then payment method to make the payment of 25c in the first place. I'd be trusting my information to a news network or some random syndication shop. Most everyone will be expecting an account set up, and then be using one of dozens of payment providers. It's just a news article, which these days are closer to blog posts.
I don't exactly want one payment network to rule them all either, so in general I think that is just a currently unsolved problem.
Apparently it's now owned by Adblock Plus and is hooked in to their compensation thing.
The cost of having a human investigate is substantial, and independent of how large the transaction is. There's also a substantial fraud problem in advertising, but consumers don't have to get involved with that most of the time. Until they're blocked by cloudflare occasionally deciding they're a bot.
Nobody wants to go to a system where for every single article you click on you have to go through the process of deciding whether it is worth the money or not.
Plus, how many times have you read some article, only to realise it was clickbait that did not really give you anything of use or substance at all; how much worse would that be when publications were literally trying to get you to part with some actual cash.
I'm also not convinced the economics would work. The reason paid print magazines are stuffed full of adverts is that the cover price did not cover the cost of publishing them. Even online, proper journalism costs quite a bit of money. Writers, editors, proofreading: it all takes time that needs to be paid for. If you pay per article, do those who worked on the article only get paid if the article actually makes enough back to pay them? Do the publications aggregate all the payments and pay everyone out of aggragated sales? If an author is particularly popular, how do they negotiate a bigger fee? These things are not impossible to sort out, but the economics of publishing would require a big restructuring and all these things would need to be hashed out.
For last 20 years, tech enabled startups, chose 'postpone profit' strategy adopting 'free to use' or 'ad supported' approach helped by raising high capital to build moats around the target market.
Now this trend can be either seen as a moment where the moat is complete and 'path to profit' is through captive customers. (Or) a decline/failure of the 'postpone profit' strategy accelerated by the current economic recession.
All social media and any other free to use switching to subscriptions is quite a probability now.
Instead, the playbook now is:
WE ARE FREE. YES, FREE AS IN NOTHINGBURGER DOLLARS. WE ARE BETTER THAN FREE! WE WILL PROMISE YOU ANYTHING YOU WANT! PUT ALL YOUR INFORMATION HERE AND WE PROMISE TO MAKE YOU FAMOUS AND RICH!
lol jk gimme that data. Also you’re locked in/addicted to our platform. Give us your money.
These things are completely different. Facebook became profitable 4 years after its funding.
YouTube adverts have always been prominent and irritating but without an account they are downright aggressive. I think an 18 minute video I watched last night had a pair of adverts served every ~2 minutes.
I stopped Premium and deleted my account to disincentivise watching YouTube as it became a huge time sink and procrastination tool for me. My solution will either work because the ads make the entire experience unpleasant enough to not bother with YouTube at all, or I'll be driven back to Premium just to save some time.
Of course this is exactly the situation that YouTube wanted to engineer, and have succeeded in doing so, but it just seems such an awful way to incentivise subscriptions.
What I do is toggle reader mode for that site if on mobile. That always bypasses it. I can also select the overlay on uBlock origin. If that doesn’t work I’ll disable JavaScript for the site since these popular need JavaScript. If all that fails I’ll simply not use the site.
PiHole protects your entire LAN (home, office, whatever).
uBlock protects your browser / device wherever it goes.
Defence in depth Is in fact A Thing.
Ads are noise. Smarter noise will still sound like noise. Perhaps, making it even more obvious, the kind that irritates people.
Gradually, the noise took more and more center stage. And then, users were forced to silence the noise.
Blurring the lines of content and noise is completely backwards. Be transparent, place ads aside the content (not within it), and everyone will be happy.
Paywalls might work for some, but the key here is being ethical. Respecting the user.
The user will reward you if you respect it. It may even respect the brands that respect its attention.
As with everything, the problem here is greed. I wish more ads were respectful. I would take them more seriously if they were.
Not necessarily, maybe as a general rule
If the ads are high effort enough, people will actively seek them out, just the effort won't scale
Sooner or later the pressure to grow revenues is going to force Meta to do ads on their subscription accounts (especially since they can charge a premium on those ads). Then they introduce "premium" subscription accounts with no ads, then those get ads, then there's the "excelsior" subscription account with absolutely no ads, and so on.
Or rather their AI will by that time have disguised ads as to be not recognisable as ads :)
And I am pretty sure just initializing the ads engine takes a half of a second or so.
Ah, I guess UX is dead in 2023
Booking one ticket involves solving 2 captchas. They even tried to involve advertising into these captchas. You had to type out some specific detail from the ad to get past it.
German had a lot of useless steps. Austrian was pretty good, but slooow to open initially. LEO express (Czech, but commercial trains/buses) was pretty ok but sometimes having bugs.
I am kinda surprised how painful the train booking sites could be :D
Jet Blue is also showing mandatory ads on the video display in front of you. They last for around 5 minutes and you cannot turn off the display while these ads are showing. This is highly annoying.
2043: you have been fined for having an unlicensed social activity. Please ensure all future social activity is properly arranged via Facebook groups or a registered chat application.
You can’t “pirate” Social Media’s original intended functionality, social interactions, because the content isn’t really the point. The connections are.
*I mean, if we have to misuse the term, which is actually about threatening to kill/killing people and robbing their boats, to mean unauthorized copying
Even if the company could make the bottom line with only a subscription fee. Someone is willing to pay a lot for visibility, and they pay more the less other ads there is. So the paper/service/blog accepts one well paying ad. And nobody minds because it was just one ad.
But look at that money, let's do another ad, just once. But this isn't the first and only so they pay a little less. So maybe we could put in two ads, I mean they are relevant and nobody cares. And suddenly ads are a commodity but you already have a ad-selling department and people willing to pay a little...
I mean I don't think ads are exclusively bad, but it's just the nature of the system that they will get worse until they are bad.
Plus, I'd guess it also depends on how you define what constitutes an "advertisement". For example, if Amazon/Apple/Netflix puts their newest show at the top of the "Featured" list, is that an ad? What if it is related to another show you watched? What if Facebook suggests trying a new shopping-related feature? To the company, and per their T&C, these may not be "ads".
Yes, if you can't disable that feature. They're clearly pushing it regardless of my preferences.
> What if it is related to another show you watched?
Yes, if you can't disable that feature because they are most likely pushing the cheapest crap they can that keeps me watching.
> What if Facebook suggests trying a new shopping-related feature?
Yes, if you can't disable that feature because I can't tell if they're just trying to be helpful or steer me toward something with higher margins for their benefit.
If I can't opt out then it's an ad
But perhaps there are laws requiring companies to get explicit consent and not simply consider it a change in the existing service nor automatically sign people up for the service with the new terms (ads)?
I think there should be. I'm not a fan of companies changing their terms at will without clear notification. Clear meaning a plain English description of what's changed, not just "We've changed our ToS, read this long legal document again."
"Enjoy ad-free music listening".
They still get paid to promote particular artists/songs to you on the home page.
Songs themselves include ads too (https://www.wired.com/2008/09/products-placed/) so "ad-free music listening" is no certainty, but I guess we can't blame spotify for that.
* In-feed ads. These include ads for content prominence (preferential placement for creators), articles with link-out, ads for Google products and services like purchasing movies and shows in their store, and ads for Google product features.
* Modal ads in videos which they facilitate. That is, pop-up ads in content.
* Ads for merchandise under the content.
* Ads for paid subscription to channels.
* In-content ads in the form of creator sponsorships. These are becoming egregious.
The official app is absolute GARBAGE now. I can't even turn off shorts anymore. I'm on the verge of cancelling Premium. Once the Digital Markets Act comes into effect in the EU in a couple of months I'll be installing alternative frontends for YouTube which include SponsorBlock.
this is weird. are we sure this is a thing in the EU? because the idea of having some sort of regulation forcing a private company to have their product offered by some other party raises so many issues. it's not like youtube is some sort of public good, it's a product offered by a private company.
who pays for the bandwidth, engineers, data centers? will the 3rd party pay for these things? if youtube is forced to break it's own TOS, and this leads to users moving away from YouTube but still somehow taking advantage of YouTube's offerings, why even provide the service at all, what exactly would be the point as the product would be loss making? and will capping access be back in the cards (we can't offer any more of these videos because it will cause losses)? and what about tracking viewers, how can we track these viewers when they're coming in from some 3rd party?
I feel like I'm misunderstanding something...
In the EU it's ok to ask companies to do things, even if it costs them money.
They would beat little to none of the video hosting and serving costs.
It's basically adding one more middleman, just like most energy companies in Europe.
what? in which country and how?
> and it's putting ads in its ad-free subscription
i pay for youtube premium. never seen an ad.
> Especially when they gained their monopoly status by operating at below-cost for years, preventing fair competition from even springing up in the first place.
i fear you are thinking about a different product. youtube is not a monopoly and it's not preventing fair competition as TikTok is even bigger.
If they go too far and Google leaves the EU market, I suspect nobody will be all that sad, goodbye giant competition, a boon for the local service providers.
I think what you are misunderstanding is: countries will sometimes be protectionist toward their own companies, but they don’t actually care if foreign companies have a viable business model, especially for non-critical things like YouTube. Asking the EU to care whether or not YouTube has a viable business model is not really reasonable.
I don't really object to ads as much as I object to the tracking that comes with them. Ad-free services that still do the tracking aren't really much of an improvement in my book.
True, but that's when you leave the service.
Reddit is one of the worst and covered in commercial, paid content. Some of it is labeled as an ad, much of it is not.
It’s a fair price to get someone’s content, and I know the revenue from that is much higher than what they’ll get from the platform’s ad share. Yet still it is irritating. The majority of content I consume idly I would never pay for. So again, a fair bargain I suppose.
There are content creators whom I’d happily support directly for the sake of the value I ascribe to their content, not just to remove their ads, but they don’t offer the option. I understand there are many reasons for any given creator why an ad supported business model may be preferable/simpler/earn more. And maybe this is just a shift in the creator economy which is more slowly dispersing than I personally would expect.
But truly from a superfan or consumer point of view, I end up valuing the paid podcasts I subscribe to on Spotify which are ad free over many pieces of content that I arguably enjoy more but are forced to skip through their ads.
I’ve paid for Ben Thompson’s content for almost 10 years now, and listen to his podcast via Spotify. I remember when he said he’d never put his podcast on Spotify, but their private/paid feed feature got him to jump and Im so glad I got to delete an extra app because of it. I’ve been listening to the McElroy brothers’ stable of podcasts for just as long, but am irritated every time I have to skip through the ad reads. I do support them through the podcast network they are a part of, Maximum Fun, but I honestly pay less than I could because I know that it doesn’t directly support them (it supports the network which in turn supports them). That’s ironic because really I should give _more_ because of that fact, but the indirection makes me uninterested in paying much above the minimum.
I love both these podcasts, and their ability to monetize are clearly different based on the product each are producing. At the end of the day though there is (in my experience) a value add provided through Ben Thompson’s business model of directly charging me for the good.
Please don’t read this as a typical HN “why doesn’t the industry cater specifically to me and the very narrow niche I inhabit”, I’m aware of many of the incentives and challenges inherent in these different business models. But as of late, with so many content creators giving the option to pay them directly in exchange for ad free experiences, paying for an ad free service like Spotify but being unable to skip ads from the creators themselves has started to really stick out to me.
I don’t know what a solution would be, nor do I look forward to paying for the majority of content I consume. In fact Im fairly confident that there is no good solution exactly because nobody wants to pay for most content and people’s time is not free. In a world where increasingly folks are putting up paywalls for content consumers see as differentiated, it starts to look more and more bleak on the ad supported side of that wall.
As a user, it makes sense to pay Spotify for music access, because Spotify, in turn, pays out a few fractions of a cent to the artist. But it doesn't really make sense to use Spotify premium for podcasts, when you can just download them directly or use various free RSS-based clients.
So why do so many people still consume podcasts on Spotify? 1. Because they're already on Spotify, so it's convenient, but more importantly... 2. Because Spotify realized they make more money if most of their users are paying, yet still consuming free (podcast) content. They don't pay out on podcasts per-stream like they do for a typical song. So ultimately, a premium user who consumes 100% podcast material is more profitable than a user who consumes 100% label-published music.
It's not a coincidence that Spotify has gradually taken over its homepage with podcast promotions, and promoted your "podcast library" as a first-class citizen, even placing it above your music library. It's all about profit margins, baby!
I don't want to see ads, any ad, ever, and so far I'm succeeding, but I wonder how long this is going to last.
But even then, the browser can prerender the page use AI to find and remove the ad and do the final render. :)
1. “Give away” access to build a network effect
2. Get a network
3. Act with righteous indignation when some killjoy like the EU comes and says that you cannot just harvest whatever user data you want at will and users don’t opt to pay the proposed ransom money
[1] Presenting their worldview as just a given, something obvious.
They do require a certain degree of technical understanding, but the extension system on most browsers is fairly mainstream so I don't think it's for this reason alone.
Can it be as simple as the idea that almost all of media is universally disincentivized from talking about them? Of course there is a lot of content on ad-blockers out there, but the pressure may still be high enough to suppress cut-through to the mainstream. If that's the case it would be a nice example as to the extent of media influence more broadly.
This article is a case in point, where you would have thought that ad-blockers may have been relevant. And as a side point, perhaps also a good example of where you don't even have to be rich if you are knowledgable. Technical literacy is in itself a kind of digital affluence.
So, yeah, internet would be different, but to me it isn't obvious how it would be any worse or less in value.
I think the internet would be worse. No matter how you put it, the ads are funding content. If ads weren't viable, we wouldn't have a different kind of content. We'd simply have less content.
If there's a content business that can exist in this ad-free internet, it would already exist in the current ad-ful internet.
I don't know what kind of internet anti-ads people envision, but I'm afraid the whole thing is very damn fragile and rocking the boat will more likely break it irreparably than make it better.
Because they don't want you to know about it. Most common users still don't. Look at where the article is published: a website that uses ads.
Crypto solves this. The barrier to entry is cumbersome because of KYC, but after that the whole ecosystem is ready to go.
People talking 25 cents for an article. The ad revenue from viewing a single page with a few well sold ad impressions at $40 CPM is like 4 cents, and more often more like < 1 cent. I keep hoping to see Basic Attention token BAT get traction for exactly these microtransaction use cases.
Does it? Transaction times and transaction fees on some of the more well-known cryptocurrencies would seem to exclude them entirely.
There’s no particular reason that it has to be a decentralised cryptocurrency that operates in the manner required - preloading a few bucks here and there, which are transferred between accounts in small amounts.
As with many things that “crypto” solves, it is neither necessary nor sufficient. Some cryptocurrencies could form part of a solution. It’s not clear they bring any specific advantages to the table though.
While some of these issues might have been solved (kind of), there's no way anyone touches crypto for end-user microtransactions with a 10-foot pole today.
[1] https://www.pcgamer.com/50-of-transactions-were-fraudulent-w...
So would an sqlite database, possibly even a csv file
Or even better, have a ZK rollup between each client and a single intermediary, who manages ZK rollups with all publishers. Then you, as a client, don't have to worry about large amounts being trapped in escrow, and publisher payouts happen more regularly.
We could call it "Mastercard"
You can argue, "yeah, but what about ublock origin (or another ad blocker)?" To you, they'd (speculatively) say, "ye are few, why bother."
Well clearly YouTube thinks it's worth it to go after AdBlock users now.
> the Norwegian Data Protection Authority strongly doubts that Meta's proposed ‘consent’ mechanism, often dubbed ‘pay or okay’, complies with the GDPR. The EDPB’s decision is therefore important to avoid Meta's infringement continuing while the company is exploring its options.
https://www.theregister.com/2023/11/28/metas_eu_privacy_fee_...
> noyb (None Of Your Business) has filed a data protection complaint against Meta over the "Pay or Okay" subscription model
I wonder if this ad/paid dichotomy is some tech startup fairy tale. Like, [we burnt capital on building an effective monopoly]^W [gave away our product for free] but now the [entitled lusers]^W [users]^W don’t want to pay 10$ a month in order to be on a social network that mostly only their one-generation-or-older relatives are daily active on.
> For journalism, this has become an existential threat as web-users generate nowhere near as much revenue than selling printed paper.
Printed, paid-for newspapers also have ads.
Unlike today, though, the ads in newspapers weren't annoying: they were just print, and didn't pop up dynamically in front of the article you were reading, and no one tried to shame you for not looking at them, unlike today's HN users.
AFAIK for most newspapers and magazines, the cost on the label was mostly there so that readers would feel like the publication was serious - differentiating them from the free papers which were clearly spam and / or propaganda
Yet, despite the newspaper being fully supported by plain, simple, black-and-white print ads (and maybe some color inserts later which were easily discarded), they managed to pay for serious journalists, and they didn't whine about how they need to track you and spy on you and force you to look at obnoxious pop-up ads to make enough money to survive.
For example, I don’t care to have a subscription to the economist, so I didn’t read this article. If I could pay like $1 for it, I probably would. But it would require a new service, I’m not going to make an account to pay $1, a good number of newspapers would have to work out a shared system before this sort of thing would be interesting.
Unfortunately the ad-net has sucked all the oxygen out of the room for this kind of business model.
Another way to monetize is to make it interactive and bring back comments. Allow a well-regulated peanut gallery for each article, but have it actively moderated, require people to use their real names, and set a high bar for what comments are even allowed. Have journalists actively engage with them. A comment will only be published if it adds value. Then encourage people to have spirited discussion about each article. And guess what, actively commenting will cost you admission.
On top of financial motivations, newspapers often have different political alignments for example, I suspect some of them basically hate each other; a system where they get along and engage in good faith is too much.
I’d rather see an account where you dump money in, the site can say “buy this article for $x”, and it asks your account for that money. It doesn’t even really need to be a centralized site, it could be an API that multiple services can implement, or whatever.
Apple’s podcast client has some ability to subscribe to the premium version of some podcasts. So they seem to have something vaguely like this. It still appears to be a monthly/yearly subscription thing though.
I decided to poke around the news app based on your comment, but I only see monthly subscriptions, sadly.
I get that newspapers want the reliable recurring subscription instead, but it just seems to weird to me that they were willing to concede to users and sell a single issue when the papers were, well, paper, but not digital. I mean it should be easier with digital, they don’t have to even make any projections about how many to print!
That’s a little more interesting.
IMO an architecture that was a little more distributed and ala cart, as you say, would be nice. But it is definitely neat that at least somebody is taking a swing at this kind of solution.
Depending on what you pay for a gym membership of course, I think I started saving money after 1,5 to 2 years (cheap gym membership compared to relatively cheap equipment at home).
Caveat, I parked my bench inside my pullup rack (don't have to move it before training though).
I just started doing personal training, which is terribly expensive but it's one of the only things that motivates me to go. The other thing that helps is being around other people who are exercising, and in a brightly-lit space.
Finally, I wanted to share that doing personal training, we spend 70% of the time doing calisthenic-type exercises that require basically no equipment at all. So if someone has the motivation, do your squats, stair-steps, stretches, running, and maybe all you need to buy is a set or 2 of free weights (by "set" I mean literally two weights of specific values, not a set of all possible weights). Other cheap and small accessories are rubber bands that go around your legs, a mat so you can crawl on the floor and not get dirty, plastic frisbee-like plates so you can do leg stretches on the carpet. I know this is all "no shit" type information for people who work out a lot, I just want to share that for someone who wants to exercise for cheap, you do NOT need a towering multi-gym set to get started. There's TONS of exercises you can do right now if you just have the motivation.
A gym membership is a complete road block for me. I get distracted by women and that kind of thing. And I don't want to wait for available equipment. Besides I want to make the noises without people looking at me, or me thinking people look at me.
Good luck with the personal training!
If I want to show something on YT to my friend, and I don't know exactly which video is correct, well lots of luck to me to find it in first few tries, as EACH video I click on will first show me a two unskippable ads, no matter how short the video is
Meanwhile (on TV) my parents just record the shows they want and wind through the ad breaks that come up on a set schedule.
I refuse to use the modern web without adblockers, and have a very friendly media usage experience without ads. Every time I listen to radio in the car, or see TV at frieds or parents I'm amazed by the volume of advertisements being hurled at the consumer. In my own environment I never get to see all this crapware.
Yea, I adblock the living hell out of my internet, so I am jaded, but I was at an older persons house with regular broadcast TV on and it was so much worse then I remember TV being when I was young.
The amount of actual show time seems to have dropped even further. The TV ads seem to be all gambling and drugs. It was pretty terrible.
If you figure out how to do this, please let everyone know. I don't think it's possible. I think humans have it baked in to them to pay attention to, for lack of a better word, information.
I used to have a long commute driving along a highway with trees and mountains along the side and, some mornings, the sky would light up from the brilliance of sunrise. Billboards tracked the highway for kilometres. Billboards were always in view and somehow they were louder than everything else. Like, if you looked at an entire landscape and the billboard, with its clickbaity text, was an absolutely small area of your vision -- it would disproportionately occupy your attention and space in your mind. Just like how you can hear your heartbeat when it's very quiet. It's not gone when you can't hear it -- the quiet things are still there and unchanged but you can't experience them when something else is being loud. In the very same way you can no longer travel down that road and experience the joy of not being sold anything,
I agree, but more than that; if we would find a way to avoid paying attention, a more pervasive way of pushing the adds would be invented.
As this becomes increasingly more common place, I'm left wondering if there is a risk of a reduced quality of life for those with neurological issues (ADHD for example), in the worst case their exclusion from society.
(Then sue Chrome for breaking things with manifest v3.)
I usually notice when I log in since I can barely click on any stories without getting told that it’s for subscribers only.
Don't worry, you will only get the best artisanal premium ads, you will learn to love them [1].
[1] https://youtu.be/hVYArjS-Ee0?si=NtJ5fzRzQXqXXf_Z&t=19