Does everyone really want tolls and meters for every click and paywalls everywhere?
One of the beauty of the ad model is that it influenced the vast majority of people to publish information in a way that did not require accounts, authentication, or any kind of barriers.
It meant things like crawlers and search engines could exist and scale to the entire Web, without having to make millions of indexing deals or paying micropayments just to index content. It means archive.org and wayback machine can exist.
It meant people could click on a link transaction free.
Though it may displease the people working in the news business, I for one, want to keep the Web as transaction free as possible.
The mobile world of app stores, install apps, and constant freemium nags to buy DLC I hope does not move to the web.
On the downside, some deep pocketed businesses subsidize everyone else's content consumption in exchange for some of their attention. It's a worthy trade for many people. I grew up poor, my parents didn't even have credit cards, we didn't pay for tv, and I had to sell my comic collection just to buy my first computer.
Being able to consume the world's information, ad supported, or charity supported, would be a far better model for my inner city neighborhood of youth than micropayment paywall madness.
On the downside, some deep pocketed businesses subsidize everyone else's content consumption in exchange for some of their attention.
That's not the most important downside by far.
The downside is that the fabric of the web and the content on it is distorted by the drive to gain views and clicks, at whatever cost, because of a purely advert drive model. Adverts migrate to the positions with the most exposure, editorial content gets thinner and thinner until it represents the minimum effort required to gain views, titles become clickbait, journalism becomes churnalism, advertorial becomes prominent, product placement becomes the norm.
There are very real downsides to the ad supported model, so if you are going to argue for a transaction free web, recognise what you are giving away - it certainly isn't just a little bit of your attention now and then.
Perhaps there are ways to address those pernicious downsides to the advert-driven model and moderate its effects, but those effects are currently distorting a lot of the content on the web to make it less informative, less engaging, and less interesting than the ads it lives to serve.
> Does everyone really want tolls and meters for every click and paywalls everywhere?
No, they don't. I'm developing a technology to make it possible to share a single subscription fee across websites and apps without having to require users to go through a centralised proxy server.
The design allows users to retain anonymity, enables subscriptions to be shared on a usage basis and means that publishers can still retain their other major income streams (ads & paywalls) while getting access to a new one.
The concept only works because it means the subscribing user has no additional cognitive overhead. No tip button to remember to click, no "read more" button to fret over, no worrying about metered content leading to a nasty surprise at the end of the billing cycle.
A single fixed monthly fee and access to ad-free content or apps anywhere.
I've been working on this since 2008 and in the coming 12 months I am preparing to launch my business based on it. Interested persons are invited to contact me -- jacques@robojar.com.
2. Their model was meant to be "viral" -- enticing sites to join by saying "hey, we have money for you". But it meant they wound up with money sitting around they can't use for anything else. In fact it imposes overhead.
As far as I am concerned (and I suspect it applies to many others), giving up my privacy to a machine that generates customized ads (or even risking losing it to third parties for more ads without my consent) is a much smaller price to pay than the inconvenience of going through paywalls and stuff. This is true especially when there's no guarantee that the article/post/whatever-content being accessed is gonna be of super-high quality. These things have been well captured through theories like Privacy Calculus [0] which basically posit that privacy concerns can often be trumped by the benefits of sharing resulting in a net positive utility.
That's a side effect rather than an essential part of the model. You would lose privacy with other models too. E.g. micropayment systems would know as much about your spending habits as Google knows about your browsing habits today.
Presumably if you have tolls on every service, you're spending at each location you're interested in. Presumably if you're doing this over the Internet, you're doing this with a credit card. Now you've just decided to give the credit card companies some nice information. In fact, this information is even more specific: it's the list of things you're actually willing to pay to use.
So then we're going to decide to change cash (not credit) for Bitcoin (and hope that guy doesn't sell the address to a marketer) and use that everywhere.
So the question then is who you want to be tracked by.
Not really. Your ISP could - for example - see which sites you are visiting and then make a payout on your behalf, aggregated with all its other users.
Flattr does this. You pay Flattr once a month, and they pay each site once a month. They just count up how much each user owes each site and makes a lump charge/payment.
Credit card companies are probably the worst, most cynical violators of consumer privacy. They have been selling data on peoples spending as well as their personal details to companies like Acxiom for years before Google or Facebook were even created.
There are almost no requirements in the US for them to "uphold privacy". Most privacy actions (by the FTC etc) concentrate on "online privacy", which is of course only one segment of what the CC companies deal with.
Read [1],[2],[3]. Surprise, surprise: the default narrative of Google and Facebook being the aggressive upstarts pushing the boundaries on what is allowed is almost completely untrue. The credit companies and data brokers have been doing things that Google and Facebook wouldn't dream of doing for years.
Are they really? Because IIRC various credit rating companies will sell your data to nearly anyone. In fact, a dark web group sold on legitimately purchased data from one of the largest credit rating companies in the world last year. I don't think these companies care about your privacy anywhere near as much as you'd think, and I don't think it's a net positive to rely on them.
If they had tolls and paywalls everywhere, do you think they still wouldn't track you to profile your interests for advertisers anyway? Your privacy is gone in either case. At least in this case you don't have to pay.
I don't get why Internet can't be funded the same way as Kickstarter campaigns. No ads, but only the people who want to pay actually pay.
I run several non-personal websites. I pay for them because the cost is simply not significant to me. (Getting time to do administrative stuff is much more costly, but that's moistly a matter of bad tooling.) It's not because I'm a billionaire. It's because running a website, even a website with thousands of registered users, is dirt cheap if you it efficiently. When you get to the scale of hundred thousand registered users things begin to get more complicated. But only a fraction of the Web really needs to be that big.
Because most people and organizations will get more return for less effort from pasting third-party ad-units into their source codes. It's not just hosting costs; there's a time investment in creating content and running web services. The Kickstarter approach of creating and promoting videos and giveaways just makes that time investment bigger.
I have made a few tools originally created for internal use at the business I work at (mainly shipping-related documentation). I made them because I couldn't find them anywhere else that met my needs. I realized others would find them useful, and I was right, because more than 500 people visit and use the sites each day. And the use of ads covers the hosting, domain names and some of my time. I wouldn't want to attempt to monetize it any other way, due to demand, time and complexity. It's a win-win situation, and ads make that possible.
My interpretation of this article was that, while there are certainly benefits to having ads as the lowest barrier to entry monetization model, there are also lots of downsides, and we would do well to come up with something else that is easy to do and works well. But nobody knows what that should or could be, or even if it is possible to do, as the other schemes thus far (paywalls, subscriptions, freemium) have lots of trade-offs. I'm personally pretty bullish on micropayments, though a good way to do them hasn't emerged yet.
If there was another option as easy to set up for your little sites that made you a similar amount of maintenance and upkeep money, would you be sad or happy to lose the ads?
As well as information about what they look at, what they buy, where they go, what they eat, who they associate with, what kind of medical conditions they may have, not to mention the contents of every work document, personal document, love letter, baby picture, vacation picture, nude picture, food picture, work discussion, personal discussion, etc. And they monetize all this, because after all they'd never spend the money bankrolling the internet unless they made more cash from the endeavor than they spent.
Did you even read the article? I don't think you read it. An ad-based web isn't a transaction-less web, the transactions are hidden in the form of ads and the ads are hidden behind numerous layers of behavior that threaten the integrity of the web, such as privacy invasions, editorialization, etc.
> Users will pay for services that they love. Reddit, the lively recommendation and discussion community, sells Reddit Gold subscriptions that give users special privileges and the ability to turn off ads.
Users do pay for those services, but not very much and not very often. There are simply too many obstacles in the way, both technological and psychological. To make it practical will require both social change and a much easier way to make small transactions. Not because it's difficult in any absolute sense, but because even the slightest practical barrier is enough to make people reconsider.
The most successful payment models now seem to be app stores and in-app purchases, which are certainly marked by convenience. You just give your credit card details once and then you can buy things with no hassle. A model like this for web content is the minimum for moving off of advertising!
More generally, though, this change is not something we can achieve unilaterally. We'd have to convince everyone else to go along with it, to choose paid services over free. Not an easy proposition at the best of times and, given the nature of the internet, not something we can force. (Fundamentally, this is actually a good thing because it means the internet can't easily be controlled, which is also why the emergence of gigantic, largely self-contained web properties like Facebook is decidedly troubling.)
> There are simply too many obstacles in the way, both technological and psychological. To make it practical will require both social change and a much easier way to make small transactions. Not because it's difficult in any absolute sense, but because even the slightest practical barrier is enough to make people reconsider.
This is basically why Dogecoin became so successful. The pyschological factors were basically eliminated ($0.0001 tip to someone because they wrote a thoughtful response and takes me 2 seconds to type in "dogetip /u/username"...no big deal) but the technology factors are still high for non-techies.
I think this is the sweet spot for cryptocoins...I imagine a future where 1,000,000 YouTube views is adless because 500,000 of those people tipped $0.0001 each.
I don't ever Like anything, because if I did Facebook/Google/whatever would broadcast that everywhere they can in the hope of generating more ad views. If I could send a "nice work!" to the author without telling the whole world, it's more likely I would.
I don't "like" videos on YouTube because I don't know what that function does. Is it going to repost that "like" onto my G+ profile? Or will it show the video on my friends' YouTube main page? I want to give some props to a guy showing me how to replace the brake pads on a Mustang without spamming my friends' pages, but I don't know what "liking" does, so I don't do it.
I once make a Public post to a YouTube video someone had made of a game I made back in high school onto my G+ page. I put a short paragraph explaining what the video was about so my friends would have some context.
That paragraph turned into a public comment on the YouTube video! What the hell! It was worded super awkwardly, too, since it wasn't written in that context.
1% isn't that bad though, considering the minuscule cost of serving one video or one web page. Conversion rates for online ads are at least an order of magnitude lower than that.
Also: People might pay for reddit, but reddit without content is nothing. And I might pay $5 for reddit, then someone links me to a site I've never seen before. Now I have to pay $5 to that site in order to view what everyone else is viewing. And the next link down is another $5. And there might be 10 unique links on the front page at one time.
Sure, I could get by well enough to only pay Reddit and Imgur, but how much of Imgur's content is ripped from another site (and if their money is directly on the line, the other sites might actually put a stop to that)? If I can't link a site to someone and have them see it without having to convince them that it's worth it to pay, the entire Internet breaks down. Facebook is now worthless. Reddit is worthless. Hell, even HN is worthless. Small sites would never convince anyone to pay for their content, since they are unknown.
Everyone would subscribe to CNN, Fox News, and Wikipedia, and that's it. That is the entirety of the Internet with a for-pay model.
Sure, but that's because you're already used to and invested in Reddit. Initially, you had to sign up with your credit card, fill out an annoying form and go through a few intimidating screens. That's exactly the sort of obstacle I'm talking about: it's certainly manageable but also certainly enough to turn you away unless you really care about something.
This is particularly relevant since one of the main reasons we're worried about the ad model at all is because it threatens the internet's decentralized nature. Replacing this with a model where you only make payments inside a few centralized organizations would not address this core issue.
That process won't scale to a whole bunch of random, disparate sites especially if you're not heavily invested into them. If you come across a cool blog post and want to tip a bit of money, you'll have to go through the same process, which is just not worth it. And that's before getting into transaction costs!
There have been various services that tried to fix them, but none so far that are convenient and ubiquitous enough to change things. And we really need change: this is, to a large extent, a social problem more than anything. The most important piece for moving away from ads is to make small payment expected and, for lack of a better phrase, socially accepted.
We already have this for small physical goods: it's easy to imagine buying a piece of gum or a magazine at a random newspaper stand. But a similarly small purchase online is both less convenient and less accepted, so it ends up being much less likely. That's the core problem.
> That's exactly the sort of obstacle I'm talking about: it's certainly manageable but also certainly enough to turn you away unless you really care about something.
Think about this for a second. The human longing for freedom of information is a terrible and wonderful thing. It delineates a pivotal difference between mental emancipation and slavery. It has launched protests, rebellions, and revolutions. Thousands have devoted their lives to it, thousands of others have even died for it. And it can be stopped dead in its tracks by requiring people to search for "how to set up proxy" before viewing their anti-government website.
And at some point you had to go through the vetting process with PayPal. When I signed on, I had to verify a micro transaction into my account (years ago, dunno about today) in addition to the traditional forms. And, of course, I thought about whether or not I trusted PayPal for a while before I took the plunge. There's baggage with every system at some point. Clearing the initial inconvenience is one of the biggest steps because it affords the user time to reconsider.
Pretty much everyone who buys things on the Internet has a Paypal account.
You may as well say that the inconvenience of opening a bank account is too much baggage for people to use Paypal, except pretty much everyone who wants to use Paypal already has a bank account.
You are correct that trying to get users to put CC details in to pay a "microtransaction" will put people off, but there are plenty of convenient (two - three click) payment processes that already have huge amounts of users.
But you go to amazon because you want to buy something, not because you're feeling benevolent, so the expectation of needing to jump through the hoop is there and the necessity of doing it is real. Plus, once you've gone through sign up once you never need to again.
Some site I've never been to before asks pretty please for 40 cents and I'm not about to go find my wallet (probably in my room across the house) grab my credit card and enter a ton of personal information into some strange form who's security I don't really trust, especially when I know the credit card processor is probably keeping 30c + 3%.
PayPal and similar help but then... I have to use paypal. If only I could just directly send the money (like bitcoin, from me to some address) with a token that the site provided me attached. Pretty sure a lot of people are working in this area to make it happen. I really think app-store ease of transactions with the open web will change things up for the better.
> Users will pay for services that they love.
>> Users do pay for those services, but not very much and not very often.
I'd say users are more readily paying for services which provide them something that others don't. For example if they value privacy they are more likely to use a service which doesn't monetize their personal information. That can be as service which charges a monthly fee, or it can be a free service which functions through decentralization.
Patreon seems to be working for a growing number of creators. Personally I've seen mine slowly rise to $70 per page of my graphic novel (before fees), during a time when I've been pretty slow on new pages. I'm really not offering anything beyond seeing new pages a day or two before everyone else, either. I'm not gonna be rich off of this any time soon, but if things continue, I'll probably be making a comfortable solo living drawing weird comics.
My first goal for Patreon was 'turn off ads on the current project'. It's REALLY nice to have them gone.
I don't know if there are any multi-person projects that're paying a serious chunk of their living expenses with Patreon yet, but I wouldn't be surprised to see it happen sooner or later.
I've just thought of a crazy idea: what if there was a subscription service, like Netflix for websites, where you'd pay a fixed monthly amount and get unlimited access to premium websites / webapps, with guaranteed privacy and no advertising? The said service would then pay royalties to the participating websites, depending on the usage.
Actually, that was my first thought - that the ISPs could pay royalties to websites, but that reminded me too much of cable companies -- too centralized. But who knows, this may actually happen with wireless internet providers offering unlimited Facebook bundles and the like...
But that's the most important part. I don't think you want ISPs to charge users $1M per month and then spread that cost to every website in the world plus all the things on the Internet that are not the "Web." I think this is far too problematic to ever work.
As others have pointed out, this is an old idea that has been attempted several times but never really taken off. I think it could work but it would be really really hard to implment successfully at scale. For example, I'm not sure it would work without strong DRM. People don't like ads and some install AdBlockers, but people REALLY don't like paying for things and I think even more of them would use paywall avoiding plugins. I think publishers would demand it (just as movie studios did with Netflix). That sounds like a huge step backwards for the web.
One excerpt that struck me is, "The essential thing to understand about small payments is that users don’t like being nickel-and-dimed. We have the phrase ‘nickel-and-dimed’ because this dislike is both general and strong." It reminds me of the perennial hubbub over unlimited cellular plans. I have so very many family and friends who only rarely use more data than you'd get from a $15/mo plan, but insist on clinging to much more expensive 'unlimited' plans they're grandfathered into because they hate hate hate the idea that on the odd month they'd have to pay an extra $10 for going over the initial allotment. Similarly for folks who barely text but still pay for unlimited texting because they'd rather pay $5/mo up front than $2.50/mo in ten-cent increments.
I subscribe to the local paper. If you amortize my subscription payment over all the articles I actually read in depth, I wouldn't be surprised to find I pay $1/article, but I think the subscription is well worth it overall. If they were to restructure their paywall such that I had to pay on a up-front, per-article basis, though, I bet even $0.10 would be enough to send me googling for the same information on a blog somewhere.
So, AOL? When AOL merged with Time Warner they made the various Time Warner magazine sites subscriber-only unless you were on AOL.
Edit: Oh, and what makes you think the advertising wouldn't come back eventually? When cable TV came out one of it's big selling points was no ads. Then, someone realized: "Hey, we can make even more money if we sell ads on top of the subscription fee." Nobody is going to resist the temptation to stuff ads into every nook and cranny unless it causes them to lose more revenue from losing customers than they gain in ad revenue, which never seems to happen.
Micropayments have been a perennial failure, but I wonder if anyone would actually use this?
I might if your "Netflix for web sites" was full of really high quality content that wasn't reachable elsewhere, but I'm not sure if I'm representative.
I would definitely be more inclined to pay a single entity and get a "bundle" than make individual purchasing decisions. But you're right, it is all dependent on the content that would be offered. Something like this would probably need a big upfront investment to get going...
Did flattr change? I haven't seen it in years but back then it was basically a tip button for your website. Not a subscription that got you access to a list of premium sites.
its been proposed many a time, the problem being that everyone wants it to be their payment scheme and every site wants more than users are willing to pay.
It's exactly like cable, and I think it would suck for the same reason I think cable sucks. Packaged deals like that are only convenient to the customer because payments are brill inconvenient. So you get stuck paying for a bunch of shows and programs you don't want, and thus funnel money away from content creators you enjoy and toward content creators that are good at making deals with the cable company.
I'm working like something along these lines for news. Email me (it's in my profile) if you're interested in finding out more and potentially working together.
That would be a simple way to ruin your viewership. I am not going to share an article/other piece of content if those who read my post can't read it as well. So now, even if half of the web subscribe to your service (yeah right) I won't share your links. With no inbound links how are people supposed to find out about your content network? And if you have no visitors, how are you supposed to make money?
> Users will pay for services that they love. Reddit, the lively recommendation and discussion community, sells Reddit Gold subscriptions that give users special privileges and the ability to turn off ads.
I've been thinking about this a lot lately, and I've come to this conclusion:
Free (as in beer) is the enemy of free (as in freedom). It's the enemy of privacy, security, and human dignity as well.
In the beginning there was the bubble. Well, actually there was DARPANet and such, but our story begins with the Internet bubble of the late 1990s.
In the early 90s the Internet hit mainstream. I was there. I got online (first by umm... borrowing accounts at my local university at 14) in 1992, then moved to a legal ISP when such things became available in my area. I basically watched the whole thing unfold.
When the Internet and the WWW went big there was a huge flurry of innovation, lots and lots of companies and open source efforts and various DIY projects and personal home pages and everything else.
The small scale stuff was -- and often could be -- a volunteer effort. To this day there are millions of independent sites and blogs and OSS projects. But the big stuff was expensive.
Building a site that is usable, content-rich, curated, and available for hundreds of millions of visitors is expensive. Building massive services like search engines is expensive. Building really high quality software is expensive. Making the gears turn is often the easy part... the polish that it takes to make something great often takes at least twice as long as it takes to do the "techie" stuff and get a working prototype.
There was always a search for ways to make it pay, ways to finance the new medium, but in the beginning it didn't feel urgent. We were building the future, and damn the torpedoes. (By now I was doing it for my day job, so I was there in the trenches coding up early dynamic sites in PHP and Java, playing with Linux, hacking network code in C.)
Lots of things were tried: early freemium models, paywalls and subscriptions, and of course ads.
Only ads worked.
Freemium can work but only if your costs per user are super-low, which they aren't for content creators or computationally expensive or bandwidth-heavy centralized services.
Paywalls and subscriptions? Nobody wanted to pay. Everyone wants free. Total failure.
Then the bubble popped and all the companies that couldn't find a way to make it pay went out of business. The only ones left standing were those who used the Internet as a secondary channel (print magazines and such) and ad-driven sites and services.
But wait... it gets worse.
Ads work but they don't. People, it turns out, hated intrusive ads, popup ads, and ad clutter in general. Ads were the only way to make the net pay (for most non-b2b businesses), but the more ads you have the uglier your site becomes. Back then they started calling it "portalitis" -- named after the buzz-word "portal" for sites like Yahoo and ICQ (remember that?) that became ad-encrusted messes.
Then Google appeared. They dropped everyone's jaws when they launched with a search engine that not only worked but was incredibly clean. I remember seeing it... a text box and "search." That's it. Lots of people think PageRank was responsible for Google's success, but I think the clean site was a lot of it... maybe as much as half of it.
The techies loved it. The users loved it. But the business folks, I'm sure, were like "huh?!? how!!!?!?"
I'm not sure if Google planned their model or figured it out as they went, but eventually they did introduce ads. The ads were targeted, mixed into results and clearly marked. People clicked them because they were relevant. Genius. Google conquered the world.
Google also did something else. They demonstrated a new and now trendy Silicon Valley business approach: launch a free service everyone loves, get a ton of users, then figure out how to monetize.
It's that approach combined with the information needed to underpin finer and finer grained ad targeting that led to the real disaster.
The real disaster wasn't ads. Ads are fine. The real disaster was surveillance as the business model of the Internet.
Facebook was the second massive company to follow in Google's footsteps business-wise with launch first, get big, then monetize. Google kind of tiptoed into the surveillance business model by way of their ad targeting needs, but Facebook found that mass surveillance was the only way to really monetize. Again I'm not sure if Zuckerberg had this in mind from the get-go or not. I tend to think not. But how else do you monetize a massively expensive to run centralized social networking site where everyone just happens to post all kinds of personal data?
The Internet, which was supposed to be our great liberator and engine of learning, became George Orwell's bidirectional TV set. It's a TV set that watches you.
... and it all goes back to free.
The need to be free (as in beer) has led to a dystopian nightmare. That's because I'm sorry folks, but nothing is actually free. It has to be paid for somehow. Governments do it with taxes. But private entities? They've had to get creative.
Unless we somehow challenge "free," I think it's only going to get worse. Surveillance will get worse. Google Glass failed but it's not the end... pretty soon there will be an effort to normalize the idea of your smartphone turning on its microphone and listening to your conversations. That data will be mined for product name drops.
I'm sure more creative ideas will be explored. I had a nightmarish thought the other night.
Full text analysis and meaning extraction is getting good, and it's only going to get better in the future. How long will it be before Google Docs, Dropbox, etc. start data mining the documents stored on their systems and extracting valuable... umm... information?
Picture this: you're writing a novel. It's a really original plot. Then you see an ad for a Hollywood movie. It is your novel, verbatim. The characters are different but the basic plot points are all there. The story is there.
Gotta monetize those data storage services somehow!
I've started to even wonder if free (as in beer) open source needs to go. The idea that software should be free means that only software that isn't free gets polished to the level that anyone uses it. The market expectation that software should be free leads software writers to look for other ways to monetize, which brings us back to surveillance and data mining. Look at some of the creepy stuff mobile apps can do, for example.
> I've started to even wonder if free (as in beer) open source needs to go. The idea that software should be free means that only software that isn't free gets polished to the level that anyone uses it.
I don't know. When I try to evaluate quality of a piece of software, my proxy (learned by experience) is: Biggest Brand In Particular Niche (e.g. Microsoft, Apple, Spotify) > Open Source > any other paid software.
Anyway, when I think about whether the Internet should move towards more paid services and less ads, my first concern is, funnily, "think of the kids". I learned most of my programming skills as a teenager, at a time when I couldn't afford anything. A lot of things I know and do I owe to the fact that pretty much everything on the Internet is free (and if it's not free, check at Pirate Bay). I'm afraid that moving towards "Pay for it" Internet will lead to the next generation of kids not being able to learn by just hacking stuff.
I have a lot of similar concerns, but I think the challenge is that just a few of us being willing to pay for our software/web sites is insufficient to overcome the momentum that ad-based models now have. There need to be enough people willing to pay that going ad-free becomes a credible business case and/or enough people routinely using ad-blockers that relying on ads becomes commercially unattractive and alternatives are more readily considered.
Neither has happened yet, though I remain optimistic that both will improve with time. Look at how the music and TV/movie industries have responded to piracy: amongst all the bitching and moaning and laughable claims of losses, there are a few big success stories, and all of them involve offering content to customers at much more realistic price points and with an emphasis on easy access one way or another.
(Disclosure: I am involved in running several web sites, some of which do not include ads and instead fund their original content by charging for access. Those same sites often advertise via the big on-line ad networks, and do take advantage of the basic demographic targeting that they offer, but we draw the line at using some of the more sophisticated and effective techniques offered by those networks because we have moral reservations about the underlying creepiness.)
Keep in mind a couple things. First, it doesn't cost very much to operate the information service called a website. But it doesn't matter how much something costs to produce, it perceived value sets the price.
The reason why paywalls didn't work is simple. Almost all websites have NO perceived value. A news site, come on.. Getting news is a total commodity. I can read about Kim and Kanye without coughing up a subscription fee From any number of places. Ever notice HBO never had a straight news program? Getting news is a total commodity and print media feels this pain quite directly.
Now for entertainment. People will pay for quality. HBO being a great example. But look how much content you get for your $12 mo. Netflix, huge. Look at all the content you get. No single website has that much proprietary desired content, and that's why pay sites didn't work.
Ads rule, because it's perceived to be free by the consumer. It isn't of course. Giving up your attention and personal data is a cost, but not felt directly. If the internet explosion of the 20 years has taught us anything, it's the amazing amount of value people will give away for free, whan they don't perceive they are giving it away. Facebook is entirely built on user generated content, and most of the others too.
Ads will not be replaced by pay for content on a wide scale. There is not enough value in most of the information on the net.
You mean, like free as in radio. Terrestrial radio has been free for a century and it worked out perfectly well, while not becoming Orwellian. It produced shows as diverse as Howard Stern and Rush Limbaugh, it helped launch tens of thousands of musicians, it provides sports news, it provides weather, it helped change the culture in the 1960s and 1970s. Even today it's one of the best sources of local news / weather / happenings. I should know, I owned a bunch of radio stations in a smaller market, and we made all of our money on advertising.
The only reason the Internet is becoming a nightmare, is because the US Government is becoming fascistic. Free is absolutely in no way an enemy of freedom; large, powerful, violent, police states are a threat to freedom, see: Ferguson.
But how much money would your ad time have been worth if most of your listeners could have simply ignored the ads altogether while still listening to the program, or refused to listen as soon as an ad came on?
One of the motivating factors for the ever more intrusive nature of advertising on the web is precisely the assumption on the part of users that it should be all free all the time. Radio comes from a much older age, people treat it like television - they expect ads.
Also there's less content overall on the radio, and a much higher barrier for entry into radio and tv than the internet.
At least for now, there is no technology capable of blocking all possible ads in a web page. If somebody wanted to include unblockable ads on their sites, they would. Yet, most sites keep displaying the easiest ones to block, because they violate their readers privacy, and advertizers pay for that violation.
If used ad-blockers, we'd be in a situation that's much more similar to radio.
How many radio stations were locals choosing from? What are the barriers to entry? Where I live, there might be a 10-20 radio stations. It's difficult to start a competing station and bandwidth is presumably tightly controlled.
If the same happened on the net (say, the US government regulated such that only a couple dozen sites could exist), I think you'd see those properties being quite lucrative.
Instead, I can start a web site laden with advertising for free and in minutes. Completely different space prior to the growth of digital radio and online streaming.
"... The idea that software should be free means that only software that isn't free gets polished to the level that anyone uses it. ..."
Linux kernel?
"... The Internet, which was supposed to be our great liberator and engine of learning, became George Orwell's bidirectional TV set. It's a TV set that watches you. ... and it all goes back to free. ..."
Telephony isn't free and is spied on. Related but not quite. Relinquishing control of server logs is the source of the problem.
An effort supported by for-profit companies paying their employees to work on the codebase. No profit, No money, no Linux. It's not your gradmas Linux anymore ;)
"... An effort supported by for-profit companies paying their employees to work on the codebase. No profit, No money, no Linux ..."
Is the work done bespoke or in support of some company objective? Is the work done critical for support or done for PR reasons?
The increasing size of the Linux kernel is due to
the incorporation of significant new features,
including a file system optimized for solid-state
drives and support for the 64-bit ARM microprocessors
(your link)
It is ludicrous to suggest that corporate largesse alone is responsible for the Linux kernel. Without the non for profit work, I'd dare say you'd be working on/with your enhanced MS-2014 Pro Servers software or some BSD variant on a VT100 terminal.
OpenSSL is another example of open source that is widely used. A lot of companies use it, make money off it yet few contributed resources. A lot of companies also got burned when a critical bug was discovered (re-discovered) [0][1] the Heartbleed bug... did the NSA exploit this?. [1]
>Is the work done bespoke or in support of some company objective?
Both.
>Is the work done critical for support or done for PR reasons?
Yes, the work is critical to the project. PR reasons? What? Its trivial to check what kind of code they're committing.
>It is ludicrous to suggest that corporate largesse alone is responsible for the Linux kernel.
Why? It is ludicrous to suggest otherwise.
Do you realize the scale of operations for a project like Linux? Do you know who is paying for all the hardware compatibility testing? You don't just say "it works on my machine" and call it a day. Linux isn't an amateur OSS project. You need to make sure that after every single release, the code actually works on the 94,000 different Motherboard/CPU/GPU/RAM/BIOS combinations. Redhat, Novel, Oracle, etc fund all of this.
>Without the non for profit work, I'd dare say you'd be working on/with your enhanced MS-2014 Pro Servers software or some BSD variant on a VT100 terminal.
And without the proprietary design of UNIX to copy, would an OS like Linux even exist? See? Using hypotheticals to reason is a pointless exercise.
>OpenSSL is another example of open source that is widely used. A lot of companies use it, make money off it yet few contributed resources.
Way to shoot yourself in the foot. OpenSSL needs funding precisely because of the heartbleed bug. It demonstrates that the lack of money in an OSS project can result in a less than optimial quality product.
>Even if those donations continue to arrive at the same rate indefinitely (they won’t), and even though every penny of those funds goes directly to OpenSSL team members, it is nowhere near enough to properly sustain the manpower levels needed to support such a complex and critical software product.
This feels slightly ironic coming from the Atlantic [1]. Though I suppose that one might hope that this implies that they wish to put such things behind them.
It's interesting that the article ends with buttons for Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and Google+. We definitely need new ways of transmitting value, and I wonder if these advertising models will lead to exactly the desired result. Algorithms are becoming more accurate at modeling the value of things, and by understanding user preferences, we can understand what has value to a user and allocate micro payments appropriately. Stellar-style peer-to-peer credit systems are exactly what we need to pay for this value. If we could calculate what is giving us value, how much to pay for it, and do so without significant transaction fees, we would have the result of multiple business models reaching a common conclusion.
In theory you are right. Unfortunately ads tend to be for crappy products. The better a product is the less advertising it needs - the utopian side-effects free cure all cancer pills would need only a single CNN interview to take over the world. "One weird trick" ads need to run constantly because they are crappy.
Ads run up against human nature to want to share useful knowledge. If ads were really good we would have places to go to see ads.
The true genius of Facebook is it's practically impossible to not use it, even if you're not signed up. If anyone mentions you, or happens to post a picture with you in you're in it.
The same applies for Google, where if you happen to be in the background of a photo which isn't shared but gets uploaded to G+ quietly as a backup of an Android phone (which they do by default) then Google (and by extension the US gov) know where you were, as per their demo at I/O about 3 years ago.
This is absolute nonsense. We spend our days using free services and reading free content which is all supported by advertisers. Google, Facebook, Tech blogs, newspapers. It's not a "sin" -- it's an incredible success.
If you don't like clickbait then don't support publishers who use it. It's easy to avoid Buzzfeed and Upworthy. If you don't like "native ads" don't click them. Support publishers who respect their readers and make a clear distinction between content and advertising. I made such a pledge on my news site.
The problem with this rosy view is the apparatus of permanent, escalating surveillance that you need to keep the shell game going. Many of the services we use are funded by venture capital, in the expectation of future profit. The only way to keep the investors' wallets open is to convince them that advertising will be a better business model in the future than it is right now. That creates a race to see who can build the most invasive systems for tracking and influencing user behavior.
> We spend our days using free services and reading free content which is all supported by advertisers. Google, Facebook, Tech blogs, newspapers.
It's kind of funny, it used to be people paid for (or their employees paid for) their homepage hosting for a blog. It's now easier and cheaper than ever to host a static site, and yet a lot of people end up on "free" ad-supported platforms.
I still read a few mailing-lists, and come across the occasional blog that isn't ad-financed (but they are usually not paid for in any direct way, except maybe by an employer -- certainly many are "free time"-projects).
Most of the things I need, have very low resource requirements -- if it wasn't for peoples insistence on using bloated technologies and techniques that add absolutely nothing to the content/value over plain html and images.
And the I read hn of course, which is sponsored, but not ad-supported. Does anyone know what (if any) budget hn has?
It's a very, very small group of people that argue this position, and they constantly recycle it; they just happen to be loud about it.
Meanwhile, a large portion of the Internet only exists because of advertising, and that will always be true. A big portion of the reading and watching public will never want to pay for all their content.
The article might as well proclaim that the advertising that supported radio, newspapers and magazines was the devil too. Because that worked out so terribly for a century, right?
Free TV is mostly horrendous where I am. Tons of ads, terrible content. Radio as well.
The only sources with quality and range are community radio (free but dependent on subscriptions) and community television (only people willing to show World Cup, but now unfortunately needing ads to support themselves) and premium services like HBO.
Private models with advertising as the revenue eventually seem to be a race to the bottom to get eyeballs on ads with as creativity and production cost as possible.
Not everyone agrees with you, though. You represent a very particular demographic. Not everyone thinks, clearly, that Free TV is horrendous. I know that sounds like a bold statement .... but there are billions of dollars that seem to backup my statement.
As the article ponts out, pre-Internet advertising lacked the kind of tracking tools that make online advertising such an effective engine for permanent, mass surveillance today.
No I don't. I don't like the look of sites that have ads blocked. Also I sometimes see ads that are interesting to me and click them. I even buy products and services because of them sometimes!
I actually don't mind ads either. But I block because of the tracking, not because I'll see a picture of ketchup or underwear. I'm uneasy about tracking, and for the moment the most comfortable position for me is to block. It's an evolving position.
What makes you think I am not going to send those headers anyways - they are darn plaintext.
Now if you have to sign and verify, it's another story but then again what stop people sharing those keys.
For the record I resent ads in all their forms TV/Radio/Internet - the latter are trivially avoidable though.
It would be pretty easy to make the system work with private keys and signed headers or even client certificates. You could stop people from sharing by putting a high enough limit on how much you could access or even just from how many ips (ie only two distinct ips in any given 60 minute window) it could be access from. Normal users would never hit those limits, of course, but pretty quickly you would hit those if you shared your access tokens.
One of the beauty of the ad model is that it influenced the vast majority of people to publish information in a way that did not require accounts, authentication, or any kind of barriers.
It meant things like crawlers and search engines could exist and scale to the entire Web, without having to make millions of indexing deals or paying micropayments just to index content. It means archive.org and wayback machine can exist.
It meant people could click on a link transaction free.
Though it may displease the people working in the news business, I for one, want to keep the Web as transaction free as possible.
The mobile world of app stores, install apps, and constant freemium nags to buy DLC I hope does not move to the web.
On the downside, some deep pocketed businesses subsidize everyone else's content consumption in exchange for some of their attention. It's a worthy trade for many people. I grew up poor, my parents didn't even have credit cards, we didn't pay for tv, and I had to sell my comic collection just to buy my first computer.
Being able to consume the world's information, ad supported, or charity supported, would be a far better model for my inner city neighborhood of youth than micropayment paywall madness.