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The web's original sin

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Re: The web's original sin

#91

Post by geon »

mikeash wrote: post #28
liotier wrote: post #12

When 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.

That seems like a bad analogy. The web wasn't built as a real-time one-to-one communications medium, it was built as a way to publish documents. Later on, enough stuff got added to the system to enable comment forms and chat boxes and whatnot, but the basis of the thing was always document publishing. Take a look at the original web site: http://info.cern.ch/hypertext/WWW/TheProject.html That's clearly a non-interact…

> The web wasn't built as a real-time one-to-one communications medium

Is that a reqirement for "communication"? Email is often non-realtime, many-to-many. No one would claim that disqualifies it from being "communication".

Re: The web's original sin

#92

Post by nas »

dpc_pw wrote: post #80

> For a desktop computer game, $/€25 is considered a reasonable price — and physical board games are often much more expensive. But as soon as people are invited to spend that money on an iOS or Android app, they soberly point out that that’s a LOT of money and they aren’t sure the app is worth it. Mobile devices are terrible for playing games. I can't imagine playing something > 100 hours on a phone/tablet... I actu…

It is such a terrible comparison, I'm surprised he used it. People who buy €25 PC games have very little in common with people who buy mobile games for $2 or buy gems or whatever for pennies.

Re: The web's original sin

#93

Post by chc »

jackcosgrove wrote: post #82

I subscribe to Pandora to block the ads. That's a viable business model. I am stunned by the amount of crap that comes my way when I happen to browse without an adblocker. Advertisers went too far, and now there's a counterreaction. I understand many media businesses are not viable without lots of advertising, but no one is preventing them from adopting a subscription model. The problem is that it's easier to dupe ad…

> I understand many media businesses are not viable without lots of advertising, but no one is preventing them from adopting a subscription model.

It doesn't matter if nobody is preventing them from doing something that doesn't work. Making a living selling subscriptions to something that isn't ridiculously premium doesn't seem all that viable. The likely outcome is that you'll reach fewer people and still won't make enough to support yourself.

I was with a newspaper that converted to online subscriptions. Online ads were a relatively poor revenue generator, but subscriptions were even worse.

Re: The web's original sin

#94

Post by nas »

creshal wrote: post #6
Finnucane wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Actually, some people _are_ paying out that much on games on mobile, but they're doing it by way of in-app purchases rather than up-front licensing.

Which is the ass-backwards financing problem the author was talking about: It would be much more reasonable for everyone involved to have a clear, up-front cost structure (even Bethesda DLCs are less scummy than the average Android app's in-purchases). Yet, consumers are not willing to do that.

I don't see how it helps his point, maybe I don't understand his argument. The iOS and Android game market had payment built into the system very early, unlike the web. Given the quality of the average mobile game, I don't see how that is an argument for building payments into web standard. The market is filled with trash games, mostly designed to trick users into in-app payments. Quality games with real effort put into them are being squeezed out.

Re: The web's original sin

#95

Post by nas »

jeffehobbs wrote: post #4

I've said this for years. If there had just been a payment layer built into the web browser spec, we'd be in different world. A monetizable world. It's still not too late.

Look at the iOS and Android market. What a utopia of high quality content. /s

Re: The web's original sin

#96

Post by z3t4 »

We badly need micro-payments! A publisher earn around 0.1 cents from ads when I read an article. I would have no problem paying that, even for mediocre "content".

It can work like when you vote on HN, you give 1 cent to the author and the one who submitted the article gets 10%. Or you get 1 cent for each like on Facebook, or 1 cent for each view on Youtube.

Re: The web's original sin

#97

Post by mikeash »

adiabatty wrote: post #89
mikeash wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Content" is to a large extend marketing shorthand for "text which improves our conversion funnel or sells CPM slots by being well optimised for search queries and/or social clicks". I guess that's the disconnect. I see that some people use it that way, but to me it's far more broad than that. I would certainly refer to blogs and other such things as "content" too.

Maybe the most widely-agreed-upon definition of "content" is "others' writing and things they publish". Consider NSBlog, a fantastic blog full of interesting and useful information for programming for OS X and iOS. I don't think of my blog as a content source, but I do think of NSBlog as one. I wonder under what conditions mikeash thinks of his blog as "content" — as far as I remember, the only time I think of my blo…

I never thought of my own blog like that, nor did I think of it not like that, it just never occurred to me.

Maybe it's just generality versus specificity. My blog has "programming articles," your blog has "writing," blogs in general have "content" (they might have images or video or who knows what). And just like you wouldn't say "objects" when you could say "people," maybe I wouldn't say "content" when I could say "articles."

And now these words have lost whatever little meaning they had to me!

Re: The web's original sin

#98

Post by avivo »

What about Patreon or Blendle? These are at least two potential solutions right now which have proven effective in similar specific circumstances (though they may not solve the whole problem).

https://patreon.com gives you continuous paying supporters without the Kickstarter cycle (ideally it would be easy for a company to count supporting open source via patreon or equivalents in a way that's nice for accounting/taxes).

https://blendle.nl enables micropayments for articles, with the caveat that they are always refundable if you don't like them. More context: http://www.niemanlab.org/2014/04/a-money-back-guarantee-how-...

Re: The web's original sin

#99

Post by Animats »

There are people who think that because they were able to "monetize" content, they have a right to do so indefinitely. That may not be the case. If ad blocking makes the entire third party ad industry go away, that's a win.

(Thought for the day: the main use case for WebAssembly will be to lock down content tighter and break ad blockers. That was the main application for Flash in its later years. Flash died because abusive Flash became more prevalent than useful Flash, and everybody started blocking it. WebAssembly may be headed in that direction.)

Re: The web's original sin

#100

Post by RUG3Y »

chc wrote: post #93
jackcosgrove wrote: post #82

I subscribe to Pandora to block the ads. That's a viable business model. I am stunned by the amount of crap that comes my way when I happen to browse without an adblocker. Advertisers went too far, and now there's a counterreaction. I understand many media businesses are not viable without lots of advertising, but no one is preventing them from adopting a subscription model. The problem is that it's easier to dupe ad…

> I understand many media businesses are not viable without lots of advertising, but no one is preventing them from adopting a subscription model. It doesn't matter if nobody is preventing them from doing something that doesn't work. Making a living selling subscriptions to something that isn't ridiculously premium doesn't seem all that viable. The likely outcome is that you'll reach fewer people and still won't make…

So what's the problem? Apparently, content creation isn't good business anymore.
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