There are only two ways to break the duopoly: create your own massive medium like Facebook or work with publishers. Having worked in this industry, I think working with publishers is an impossible battle. The whole publishing world is rife with fraud and desperate attempts to increase page views.
Most publishers cram their websites with ads. The number of low-content, click-baity websites is just staggering. Sometimes I wonder how could this even be a profitable proposition for advertisers. This is one reason why Google absolutely dominates the space. It has the capability to deal with all the fraud, calculate the right reward for publishers, and give a meaningful ROI to the advertiser.
Maybe a new kind of advertisement medium could unseat Google from its dominance but the way digital advertising works today, it sounds like an impossible idea.
We sell our own advertising space, self-host it, and use static jpgs for the graphics.
The ads are also targeted against the content (office design) and tend to be for products like office furniture. In a roundabout way this targets the readers but only because if they are on the site they are likely interested in learning about new products in their field.
It provides better observability on what's actually going on with your ads, and allows for an advertiser to buy based on available inventory (e.g. # of impressions) rather than a date range.
I'd like to see an industry by which companies or their advertising reps engage with sites in a subscription-like mechanism for direct advertising. Cutting out the middleman seems like a logical step in this day and age.
Look at Pinterest, Twitter, Nextdoor, SnapChat etc - there are a generation of new advertising and content machines that are being built in different verticals as we speak. Ultimately, they'll hold all the distribution power across different contexts. I wonder what kind of publisher this kind of world incentivizes.
just a couple counter examples I wanted to point out:
giantbomb.com (ads + subscription only content)
4chan (I would like someone to explain it more deeply to me, but I think they run their own ads, do they use an outside service?)
4Chan’s ads are purchased mostly by users of the site and generally end up pointing back at other boards on 4Chan itself, accompanied by some site relevant image. For a long time there were also occasionally ads for J-List (an importer and seller of Japanese drinks, foods, toys etc.) which was a direct purchaser of ad space from the site itself.
Having users pay for ads instead of third parties keeps it quite neat and generally quite safe, but I don’t think 4Chan itself is profitable.
That's just a format, it doesn't solve anything else. It can still be poor quality, misleading scams, more numerous than the content and there are plenty of "native" networks like Teads that only do intrusive video advertising while claiming to be native.
All the more reason we need adblockers and private-by-default browsing. It worries me that I can't use something like Privoxy on Android without rooting the device. An alternative would be a good privacy VPN with blocking/filtering of ads and trackers.
I've switched to using Firefox Focus as my main Android browser. It provides ad blocking and privacy features. For apps, I try to avoid ad-supported ones whenever possible, and am happy to pay for apps that I find useful.
I'd it possible to import passwords and bookmarks into focus? I've been meaning to ditch chrome on all devices because of the sewer of ads on chrome mobile
I think you're missing the main point here. What we really need is a better way to pay for the web. If everyone blocks all ads without solving this problem first there won't be any content left to block ads on.
There was also commercial ad-supported content before tracking advertising. You know, 100% of ad-supported content before the Web. The world will for sure not end if spyvertising goes away.
HN has ads, but they're text only, non-tracking, and posted infrequently. They're also not trying to sell you anything, and not trying to manipulate you emotionally. You can identify them by the lack of upvote option. These kinds of ads are tolerable IMO.
For certain there wouldn't be content whose only purpose is to maximize ad revenue. That would easily be a net positive for overall quality of online content.
The problem with subscriptions is not the cost, its the sheer number of them - and some come up almost accidentally. I pay a lot to my ISP every month. I would like to see a company that charges me monthly to eliminate all adware by micro-paying the participating websites for my actual page visits. In fact, if my ISP added such a service for a fee, I would sign up.
We tried this - there's a lot of political and business issues that basically mean you can't pull it off unless you're a major player (like Verizon or Google) already. Selling the data (of which one of the uses is advertising) is more lucrative than letting users pay direct, and that's before overcoming the hurdle of most consumers who think that they already pay for "the internet" including all the content.
Google's has the Google Contributor option [1], but that only applies for ads via their ad network and not other potential sources. There's also Flattr which is not as automated but it's now owned by AdBlockPlus crew and has raised rates so it's not such a transparent and clean system anymore.
Forgive me if this is naïve, but how does Joe Random site owner participate in the selling of data? My impression is that that's an area of commerce with a pretty closed membership.
I'm not asking in order to do something like this, just that I think it's an interesting question about exactly who is able to profit from activities that are somewhat assumed to be occurring everywhere, and not by and within the ad networks that everybody is using.
I was talking about the companies that would be in the position to do subscription bundle handling, and they're more interested in the current situation.
Publishers can participate in selling user logins and analytics data through various data companies, they're always interested in more data and especially anything unique that your site adds. You should have a certain scale though for the contract to be worth it, otherwise if its just a personal blog then you're probably just limited to run adding some ads from the typical ad networks.
The only places that buy and sell user data are spammy mailing lists. That's it.
Browser history predicts almost nothing, anyway. There is no market where user data is bought and sold, except for spammy mailing lists to other spammy mailing lists.
There is a vast market for consumer data (which is more than just browsing history) with everything from credit agencies like Equifax to data brokers like Axciom to traditional analytics companies like Nielsen and Comscore to top tech companies like Google, Adobe, Oracle, Salesforce, and others that have marketing clouds with DMP platforms. It's a massive industry.
You want your ISP to [be able to] spy on, and track, your browsing habits? For unencrypted pages, that would probably take the form of DPI and injected javascript. For encrypted (SSL) web traffic, all your ISP has access to are 1) the ip of the website, 2) SNI hostname, if any, in the SSL helo, and 3) how long the TCP stream stays alive, which is probably not representative of your interaction with the site. They have no page-level information.
There's already a service that is probably capable of doing what you ask. It's called google analytics. Google's in the payment business, and google's in the tracking business. If only all publishers could agree to use analytics.js, and petition google to implement micropayments with some agreed upon fee structure.
I am sure there are ways to design such a system that precludes tracking. For example, suppose I have a browser that includes an extension that does this: I want to visit U (some url). My browser sends a request to the no ad service to see if U has signed up. If it has, then it sends me a once-only token. I send this as proof of status to U, and they send it to the no ad service to claim their micro payment. The only parties who know I have visited U are (a) my ISP - I assume all requests probably go through them; (b) the no ad service (actually, all they really know is that I asked for a token); and (c) U, of course - although all U knows is my IP address, nothing else.
Anyway, that is roughly how such a service might work. I am sure that even better safeguards could be designed into it.
> I would like to see a company that charges me monthly to eliminate all adware by micro-paying the participating websites for my actual page visits.
I (and others) am working on this; I call it microsubscription. It's a common idea: I've seen maybe a dozen closely-related variations on it since hitting on it.
In typical techie fashion I became obsessed with the technical problem of preventing publishers from inflating their figures while also preserving user privacy. I solved it, was granted a relevant patent two days ago and I guess we'll see what happens in 2018.
>I don’t think subscriptions are the only answer here, as many do.
>We need models that support free consumption of media for many reasons.
If you rule out paid subscriptions to subsidize the freeriders, what options are left for "free" consumption? Either advertisements or a government-sponsored system (e.g. citizens taxed to support the BBC tv channels).
If there's a crypto financing option that Fred is hinting at, what would that look like?
A cryptocurrency-backed tipping model (extremely low friction in tipping compared to any non-crypto alternative) is starting to look very promising.
Take a look at http://steemit.com/ for instance. It's kind of a Reddit clone based on that model. I think it still only has fewer than 1 million users, which means the quality of the user-generated posts won't be as good even as that from the (much larger) Reddit right now. But the tipping itself seems to be (largely) working.
I say largely, because last I checked months ago, I still thought it prioritized a sort of feedback loop for the "rich to get richer" on the platform. But this is easy to change with an algorithm update. My guess is the main reason they don't do it is because having people earn "$1,000 per post" is getting them a lot of publicity and word of mouth promotion, compared to if they made it so "almost everyone can earn at least $1-$5 on every post".
But as the platform grows (and the money on the platform grows with it) I would like to imagine they won't allow the "famous posters" to make tens of thousands of dollars on every post, and they will try to redistribute that to the rest of the platform users. If they don't do that, the platform will fail under its own weight anyway, and another competing cryptocurrency tipping platform will take its place.
But overall, I think this sort of platform has extremely high potential. I've seen many smaller-time Youtubers start using it, because it almost immediately allowed them to make more money than they made from YouTube alone.
Oh, and perhaps the "secret sauce" of the Steemit.com site is that it also spreads the earnings with the upvoters/downvoters as well as the commenters, which is basically paying for the curation of the platform, thus offering real monetary incentive to do those actions properly (although I imagine there may be some who try to abuse it, too).
steemit seems like a ponzi scheme. Could someone explain the whole "powering up" system? I think it's counter example to Proof of Stake, like there isn't the economic incentive there is for Proof of Work
Any idea why Fred is not a believer in subscriptions?
My hypothesis is subscriptions, for news at least, are all-or-nothing propositions. But in a world where there's so much content, much of it for free, we will only want to bypass a paywall for a given site occasionally when we encounter it.
Why hasn't someone built a variable subscription model that is geared to one's reading habits?
The idea of variable subscription models is interesting, especially if the consumer can see detailed justifications for their bill. I think that's a key point in battling subscription fatigue.
Software companies water down their financial models to a very simplistic bill, partly because there's no way of (easily) variably billing consumers of their software, but also because it's easy to understand.
I know that if I received an easily digestible bill of my monthly Spotify usage, and was charged more than what I'm currently paying for on my fixed plan, I'd be ok with it. I also know that if I'm not using Spotify as much for a specific month, and was charged less than what I normally pay for it, I'd also be very ok with it!
A subscription is like a gate that gives you admission to certain content. As a general rule, the gate that gives you admission to the MOST content wins. Illustrative examples include:
-- Search engines clobbering "portals".
-- The huge subscription market for Bloomberg, et al. (In its early years, Bloomberg consistently offered more information than its competitors.)
-- ASCAP.
-- Netflix.
-- Kindle Unlimited.
More limited subscriptions can of course succeed if their value propositions are sufficiently simple and compelling. For example:
-- Pre-internet, business newsletters and almanacs had a good market, especially if they had valuable and unique raw information.
-- Pre-internet, the only categories of consumer newsletter that had good markets were in investments and health. In both those cases, the value proposition is pretty clear.
-- Our household subscribes to HBO almost solely for Game of Thrones.
>Any idea why Fred is not a believer in subscriptions?
He's ok with subscriptions. However, his particular statement is in context of subscriptions interfering with providing free content.
As far as I can tell, if we want to have websites provide "free" content we have the following choices to that puzzle:
1) sponsored by advertisers
2) sponsored by government taxes (e.g. collect a new "web usage tax" from citizens to fund a CitizenBook as free alternative to Facebook ads and PublicNewsTimes as free alternative to New York Times paid subscription. I doubt that enough voters would support such a tax just to avoid ads.)
3) blockchain? cryptocurrency? (Not sure what Fred has seen with this option.)
>We need models that support free consumption of media for many reasons.
We have that already. In fact, we've had it for a while. The problem is that we keep taking something that is already free to distribute, and putting it behind arbitrary gates. We then think it's perfectly normal to pay the gatekeepers.
I don't know why we still use this model which hasn't made sense for >10 years.
This is something that I'm exploring in 2018 with a group of people from the publishing world. Still very early stages, but if you have any further ideas or solutions then we'd love to hear them:
These people project that we'll be setting $105 billion on fire for digital ads by 2019. To put that in perspective, it's more than 10% of what we spend to provide health care to seniors and poor people via a mostly dysfunctional health care system: https://www.hhs.gov/about/budget/fy2017/budget-in-brief/cms/...
It feels like an obvious revenue stream for content publishers is in education - specifically, MOOCs. "Content" is really access to interesting information and storytelling. That'd lend itself well to highly specialized MOOCs that people would pay for, potentially. (I guess that's not technically a MOOC, but you know what I mean).
With increment in dollars spent on digital advertising there seems to be a huge growth potential for online advertising agencies that can create successful campaigns- those not measured by likes, clicks, taps ... But by actual sales figures.
All that needed to happen is that the authority responsible for enforcing US antitrust laws vetoed against the acquisition of DoubleClick by Google and of Whatsapp by Facebook. Why haven't they?
market participants not taking externalities into account. i.e. this transaction benefits both you and me, but doesn't take into account the effect of the transaction on the environment/others
No, I didnt. I said I don't see the duopoly as a failure. Not all aspects of the current advertising industry are necessarily a consequence of duopoly.
Being against government intervention is naive. If the US did what the EU has done with allowing people to avoid being tracked the big tech companies would be nudged toward developing smarter business models. Maybe it's not necessary but it's foolish to dismiss government out of hand.
Allowing your largest companies to compete over hijacking your public's attention is precisely the sort of thing that reeks of government failure.
This generation of internet users is a lot more willing to pay for content than mine was. Gen X's reluctance to spend money online is what created the attention economy to begin with. Maybe the shift will happen on its own, but how much damage will we do in the meantime?
Two examples I can think of off the top of my head are news subscriptions, and Patreon. Both seem to be growing a good clip. A decade ago there was a lot of talk about digital subscriptions as a business model, but few if any success stories.
> If the US did what the EU has done with allowing people to avoid being tracked the big tech companies would be nudged toward developing smarter business models. Maybe it's not necessary but it's foolish to dismiss government out of hand.
Do you think that they would really get "better" for a consumer, or more covert as they become "smarter"? I'd assume the latter.
If the US did what the EU has done, I would probably have to wait another 50 years for products I use every day like
- Google Maps
- Google Speech Recognition
- Google Photos Search
- Google Home
I'm thankful that my government has allowed innovation to continue. I'm glad they have represented my interests as a consumer by favoring technological growth over protection I neither want nor need.
Note that China has reproduced to a large extent and in some areas exceeded these services within a few years precisely through massive government intervention
Ever used Skype? Spotify? Trivago? Those are EU tech products many people use everyday, just goes to show that intervening from time to time doesn't necessarily mean that we live in some socialist, repressive regime.
This is where all corruption originates.
One group seeks to use the state to impose their will on another group.
The victimized group, in turn, seeks to defend itself by bribing the enforcers.
Instead of capital flowing to those who are best able to convert it into the most happiness for the most people, it flows to those seeking to enrich themselves by pitting people against each other in order to extract ever larger bribes.
The state grows ever more corrupt in this fashion.
It might be wise to refrain from the impulse to use force long enough to consider alternative ways to remedy the perceived problem.
> Instead of capital flowing to those who are best able to convert it into the most happiness for the most people
This isn’t the natural progression of free market capitalism though. The money will flow to those who are best able to use it to control the behavior of their customers spending. Making someone happy is just one way of controlling their spending, but there are many, many others.
That's an interesting point. Are there any examples of "alternatives ways of controlling the behavior of their customers spending" which do not result in the customer feeling motivated to withdraw from the relationship?
> capital flowing to those who are best able to convert it into the most happiness for the most people
Capital flows to those most able to make money, which isn't necessarily by "converting it into the most happiness." You can even see it in this space: Facebook is the dominant social network and wins by essentially getting people addicted to getting mild social affirmations from a slot machine. Studies have actually shown social network use makes people less happy.
Or, you know, government happens to be the best solution we have to certain types of coordination problems, some of which plague market economies.
But no, I'm sure literally everything government does that interacts with the market just creates corruption without sufficient benefit to outweigh any such harm, and it'd be better if we didn't do anything at all. Certainly it's easier to think about politics if we can permanently rule out an entire class of solutions this way, saving us from having to consider and weigh each per se. Bonus points if we can define "liberty" as "fewest things outlawed by government"—measuring that is way easier than trying to figure out the degrees of freedom of action available to ordinary people in practice.
Lots of quick hacks lead can lead to the accumulation of technical debt which can seriously impair the ability of the system to function. This can be even more problematic if the technical debt becomes a living entity intent on surviving and thriving whilst being dependent on an ever growing number of quick hacks as its only means of sustenance. ;)
It's a mistake to focus too much on one problem to the exclusion of all others. There are problems caused by government intervention but also problems caused by the lack of it.
What you call "imposing their will" might be called "balancing the scales" by others. In any organized society, government necessarily creates economic rules and incentives one way or the other, through action or inaction. The debate must be over which rules provide the proper incentives to maximize utility for the most number of people, not whether rules should be made at all.
Fair. "Balancing the scales" is a laudable goal. I merely wish to point out that suggested mechanism of balancing carries a significant downside and we might want to consider alternative means of achieving the goal.
Innovation would be my preference. The more corrupt a monopoly becomes, the more motivated the best engineers are to join a startup with a "Don't be evil" mission to take them down. ;)
Instead of 'the market', think of government as a union representing the collective interests of citizens and empowered to intervene when those interests are threatened by forces of nature (which I would say very much includes 'the market')
Most publishers cram their websites with ads. The number of low-content, click-baity websites is just staggering. Sometimes I wonder how could this even be a profitable proposition for advertisers. This is one reason why Google absolutely dominates the space. It has the capability to deal with all the fraud, calculate the right reward for publishers, and give a meaningful ROI to the advertiser.
Maybe a new kind of advertisement medium could unseat Google from its dominance but the way digital advertising works today, it sounds like an impossible idea.