This is a straw man argument. Content providers who believe their content has value should build a pay wall to generate revenue.
The web's original sin
61–70 of 132 posts
Re: The web's original sin
#62I don't understand. This article claims users feel entitled to free content on the internet and then goes into a rant about pricing and ad blockers while doing nothing to address the glaring fact that he himself thinks he's entitled to make money off of content. The internet is for the people. It is a free and open service for anyone to use. The only one entitled is the content creator who feels that they have a righ…
> The internet is for people, not for businesses. Businesses are just people trying to make a living, which just about everyone has to do.
Indeed, some of my best friends are businesses.
Re: The web's original sin
#63When I open my mouth to talk to my neighbor, I am not producing "content" - I am communicating. The Web is a communication medium. The lack of commercial functionality baked in the communication medium is a feature not a bug. Whoever uses the word "content" betray his bias as a commercial publisher.
An analogy with printing press would be more apt.
Re: The web's original sin
#64Is it really an original sin if ad-financed free content is, as the article indicates, a mere .275% of the online economy? > The price difference between desktop apps and tablet/mobile apps does not make any sense, but everybody pretends it does. I dunno, it makes a lot of sense to me: my phone has a screen which is under 11 sq. inches while my monitor is over 300 sq. inches, for a more than 28-fold difference in vie…
I have had easily 2 orders of magnitude more fun with desktop games (CS, Portal, HL2, Mirrors Edge) than mobile ones.
Re: The web's original sin
#65Without ads, people would still put up tons of free content. Not just for the love of humanity, but also because receiving attention is a kind of power. People crave to influence what others think. As long as you have that, you can always rationalize away the lack of money.
And this is certainly a generalization/assumption, but all else being equal it will probably be easier for the person with a tech blog getting 150K uniques in a month to get a job than the person without it. So even having this large block of free content can have a direct financial impact on the creator without syndication/ads/sponsors etc.
I have a blog that gets about 12k visits a month. I certainly don't have people beating down my door to hire me, but more that one interviewer has mentioned my blog as a plus.
If you're the person known for browser compatibility tests, I can imagine that would be helpful for certain classes of jobs and consulting assignments.
Note this doesn't mean that I think the author should continue posting awesome content for free. It's his life, he can do what he wants with it! If it isn't generating the required job or life satisfaction, he should definitely quit doing it.
Re: The web's original sin
#66For the past few years I've increasingly started thinking that 'free' can be pathological.
The problem is that it's a lie. Everything takes effort to produce. Nothing is actually free. Sure you can give something away-- that's a gift. But it's not free.
Sometimes it's okay if the person or entity releasing something for free is intentional about that: "I'm going to do this because I feel like it and I expect nothing (tangible) in return" or the corporate equivalent of "we are going to make this free because it's part of our strategy or because we have nothing to lose by doing so."
Then you get one of two scenarios:
(1) The original honest intent was to make X free but now it's getting so much attention that it's becoming demanding. Now the person or entity releasing X has a choice between a number of bad options: keep it free and continue to sink time/money into it, abandon it, change its status to non-free, or find some indirect way to monetize it.
(2) "Free" was a lie from the get-go. It was just a growth hack, a gimmick. The intent was always to find some way to "flip the switch" and monetize.
The difference between these two scenarios is the original intent, but the end result is often quite similar.
Abandonment is always an option (at least with scenario #1), and that's how a lot of free things end up after the burnout sets in. But if abandonment isn't an option you're basically faced with the choice between making something non-free and indirectly monetizing it.
Revoking free status is unpopular and will probably lose you a lot of users. The strong temptation, especially given the success of this model, is indirect monetization.
That's where things get pathological. Indirect monetization means ads and surveillance, and on a bidirectional medium like the Internet ads basically mean surveillance. You're turning your users into a product and selling them out.
Unfortunately we've raised a generation to believe that "all information should be free, man!" This is leading us directly down a terribly Orwellian path-- to make the free lie work, vendors have to treat the user as a product.
Re: The web's original sin
#67> Free content entitlement, that’s what.
From the beginning the web has been about cutting out middlemen. Sure, everyone still pays for the bytes, but consider how much less it costs, per-viewer, to distribute a paragraph on the web versus printed on paper.
Want to communicate quickly and cheaply, without paying for stamps or surcharges for expedited delivery? E-mail.
Can't find a publisher willing to take a golden-master and create thousands of CD-ROMs? Sell your own software online.
> This sounds sober and serious, but it omits one crucial clause: the people who create free online content expect to get paid.
The real issue is that there are middlemen who promise "I will convert your consumer-visits to cash" that also expect to be paid. Many happen to be ad-networks, and the profit motive (both from producers and middlemen) has led towards practices that harm consumers and (indirectly, long-term) the producers.
Privacy invaded, malware distributed, computers slowed, load-times skyrocketing, etc. Absent a reaction from producers or consumers, the most-ruthless ad-schemes tend to rake the most profit, so it becomes a race-to-the-bottom.
In this sense, consumer-driven ad-blocking is ecologically-necessary to make that "Visitors-To-Cash" industry refocus on other mechanisms and better ways of interacting with their two main stakeholder groups. In a very broad sense, it's their job to find a better solution.
Re: The web's original sin
#68[deleted]
Re: The web's original sin
#69Am I the only one who believes app stores should have a minimum mandatory price of like $5 (maybe geographically customizable)?! And yes, you should also be allowed to publish free apps, but they should be really-free , so if you set your apps price to $0, you are forbidden to have any-kind of in-app purchases (and maybe even forced to be open-source ). Want to do have the in-app-purchases: then put a goddam minimum…
Define "make profit from the users attention". Would HN have to charge? It's certainly a valuable resource for YC, even if the profit is indirect. What about Wikipedia? Do donations count as profit? Should search engines have to charge?
By the way, you'd be destroying a whole lot of community-driven sites that charge for certain extra perks to keep the lights on.
Re: The web's original sin
#70I don't understand. This article claims users feel entitled to free content on the internet and then goes into a rant about pricing and ad blockers while doing nothing to address the glaring fact that he himself thinks he's entitled to make money off of content. The internet is for the people. It is a free and open service for anyone to use. The only one entitled is the content creator who feels that they have a righ…
> The internet is for people, not for businesses. This doesn't square with the fact that, at the end of the day, someone has to pay for hosting and bandwidth - not to mention that content creation costs time (money) as well. Ignoring these realities and pretending that the internet is free just externalizes the cost onto those who aren't savvy enough to use an ad blocker or avoid ransomeware.
That's not my problem. You're not entitled to that hosting and bandwidth. If I wanted to, I could host a website off my laptop for a couple hours a day if I wanted to. There is no law of the internet that guarantees a user can be subjected to ads without their consent. The only rule is that any device with a browser can view your content across the world.
A user is not entitled to pay / reward a content creator for creating content. That content creator made the content of their own free will. A website is a tool that drives revenue. If there's something to buy or purchase, I can buy it. But a content creator cannot tell me I should not be using an ad blocker because it's how they make money.