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Content is dead

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Re: Content is dead

#91

Post by vkb »

danso wrote: post #40

I know these anti-ad posts are a dime a dozen here, but this is one of the more self-entitled pieces of dreck in the genre. She spends the first part of her essay slagging on WIRED ( "Wired has dabbled in and eventually succumbed to the technology it once skewered and analyzed. Its latest efforts inevitably include pandering to the Instagram crowd." ), implying that she's too good for their lowbrow content, and then…

> What's so difficult about just opening an incognito window and suffering the couple of seconds it takes for a computer halfway across the world to deliver you content while you sit at your desk?

The whole point of the post was that I'm doing something inordinately ridiculous to access a little bit of good content. Scraping and incognito browsing are both anti-patterns that are symptoms of a sick media industry. A media that is sick cannot provide us with good news and content that we can use to further our critical thinking, and we should be worried and thinking about how we can possibly solve this problem instead of trying to bypass it.

Re: Content is dead

#92

Post by anexprogrammer »

danso wrote: post #40

I know these anti-ad posts are a dime a dozen here, but this is one of the more self-entitled pieces of dreck in the genre. She spends the first part of her essay slagging on WIRED ( "Wired has dabbled in and eventually succumbed to the technology it once skewered and analyzed. Its latest efforts inevitably include pandering to the Instagram crowd." ), implying that she's too good for their lowbrow content, and then…

See for me, the strangeness of this post is not the anti-ad message, though she does lay it on a bit thick, it's the solution. That said, I'm quite happy with most anti-adwall points of view, I share them. :)

Maybe I'm just not enough of a techie any more, but "switching between Android and iOS" doesn't strike me as unusual enough that any one site is the only place with the right answer. So long before I break out curl and write little python scripts I'd hit at least two non-paywalled sites for an answer. Or in the case of Wired turn JS off and happily read all their content. Either is much quicker than the simplest scripting moment...

I'll save the scripting moments for the sites that appear to be the only place with an answer to something esoteric, like the single hit for a driver or kernel issue.

Re: Content is dead

#93

Post by narrowrail »

leereeves wrote: post #87
pcmaffey wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not 100%. But what about 80%? Even 50%? Is it still worth it for publishers? The greatest cost of digital fraud in a case like this would be perceptual... given the current paradigm.

The cost of fraud would be roughly the same as browsing with an adblocker now. But probably the hardest part of creating any system like this is getting everyone on board at once. There's a big incentive not to join the system. (People who don't want to or can't be bothered to join will visit your site instead.)

I think it would be quite straight forward to develop an extension that does client-side analytics of your browsing history, just to show you which sites you visit and how much time you spend per url/ TLD. It would be on your honor to choose to give 'patronage' and the code is auditable as a browser extension.

Re: Content is dead

#94

Post by anexprogrammer »

Animats wrote: post #10

We'll know that ad supported content is dead when AOL, or "Aol.", or whatever, and Demand Media, go bust. They will not be missed. Micropayments are going nowhere. As I've pointed out before, the enthusiasm for micropayments comes from people who want to collect them. There's very little consumer demand for the ability to send somebody a dime. Subscriptions work only for very high quality content. The Economist, yes;…

> Newspapers with big reporting staffs, yes

Economist and FT, yes. Newspapers with big reporting staffs, I'm not so sure any more, unless everywhere ends up paywalled.

Haven't we all got used to getting our news buffet style? We'll take a few articles from the BBC, the Guardian, the NYT and the Washington Post? Twenty years ago I'd have a broadsheet paper to read on the commute and over lunch. Now I'll skim multiple quality news sites to get a similar amount and breadth of content. I believe, mistakenly perhaps, that I get a better spread that way.

Micropayments don't cut it a) because I don't want all your content like I once did, and b) you want far, far too much per article compared to the £1 or two to buy your actual paper output with dozens or hundreds of articles, but nowadays I might only read a couple a day, or even a week, instead of twenty+ daily.

Re: Content is dead

#95

Post by anexprogrammer »

misterbwong wrote: post #46
intrasight wrote: post #22

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Just remember that "adblock" doesn't block ads - it blocks ad networks. If publications ran their own ads (like they do in print) the ads would likely a)be of much higher quality, and b) not be blocked by "adblock"

Adblock can (and does) block ads that are not a part of an ad network. If you're thinking making publishers handle ads will bring them back to the "good ol' days" of static print ads, you're mistaken. The only reason we haven't had these types of ads in the past is because the medium (print) didn't support it. 1. Most times, bad ads aren't written by the publishers at all-they are written by the advertiser. The flash…

1. The ad network permits the bad ad, regardless of who writes them. If the ad network didn't drop 400 domains worth of 3rd party cookies, with tracking, and give me such shite as autoplaying video, maximise on rollover and the like, I'd whitelist them. Or more likely never have blocked them in the first place.

2. They'd not be able to follow me around the net though, repeatedly showing me some car ad I accidentally clicked because it maximised on me.

3. Every print display ad I've ever run (quite a few) has been proofed by the publication prior to run. I'm not Pepsi so perhaps different rules apply?

Re: Content is dead

#96

Post by zem »

return0 wrote: post #89
zem wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i have read some very good creative commons novels and fanfiction, so for writing at least free has proven to be high quality. likewise for webcomics; i've seen strips that are every bit as entertaining as the professional strips that run in the newspapers. for other media, such as music, video and animation, one of the problems is that there is a barrier to creating casual content with decent production values. like…

> the better and more popular your work is, the more money you'll make from it That is not always true. Highly specialized content, which has tiny audience, can be equally profitable. In the end, money reflects the need for the content.

true, and there will always be a market for good content, especially authoritative technical content (financial newsletters are a good current example - people pay for them despite all the free and ad-supported websites out there).

it's also possible that the desire to have everything be free will trigger a worse-is-better downslide where no one creates really good content because no one will pay for it because everyone is satisfied with good-enough free content, but i doubt that will happen; i just want there to be enough good-enough free content that people who can't or won't pay still have their needs met.

while we're dreaming, there are two things i'd really like to see emerge:

1. a true shared culture with a continuous gradient from pure consumer to prolific producer. something like tumblr is a good proto-example - there are people who just browse feeds, and people who reshare, and remix, and add their own writing, and write entirely new posts, and every now and then a truly beautiful post emerges and makes its way out onto the wider web

2. a thriving distributed patronage model, where people fund the creation of a work via kickstarter etc., but then the work is released freely, having made its money already

both these things are already starting to be experimented with, but they are badly in need of mindshare.

Re: Content is dead

#97

Post by danso »

vkb wrote: post #91
danso wrote: post #40

I know these anti-ad posts are a dime a dozen here, but this is one of the more self-entitled pieces of dreck in the genre. She spends the first part of her essay slagging on WIRED ( "Wired has dabbled in and eventually succumbed to the technology it once skewered and analyzed. Its latest efforts inevitably include pandering to the Instagram crowd." ), implying that she's too good for their lowbrow content, and then…

> What's so difficult about just opening an incognito window and suffering the couple of seconds it takes for a computer halfway across the world to deliver you content while you sit at your desk? The whole point of the post was that I'm doing something inordinately ridiculous to access a little bit of good content. Scraping and incognito browsing are both anti-patterns that are symptoms of a sick media industry. A m…

> Scraping and incognito browsing are both anti-patterns that are symptoms of a sick media industry.

No, the cause (and, well, symptoms, too) is lack of revenue, something which was set in motion long before ad networks came into play and were the devil that many publishers felt they had to sign with.

It's worth noting that in the early years, publications just threw up their content for free and went within the flow [1]. Within the industry today, it's (pointlessly) debated whether that was the right thing to do [2], as now everyone comes to expect the content to be free (nevermind the problem of other sites just copying-and-pasting entire articles).

Either way, readers weren't offering to pay up back in the heyday when news outlets had plenty of money to do indepth journalism and offer it for free. Now news outlets have neither but they continue to offer their content for free. And apparently, those years of free, good content wasn't enough to convince consumers, years later, that it'd be nice to get financial support (via subscription). And so now the mechanism that many of them resort to to capture revenue -- third party ad networks -- is odious to people like you...and I sympathize...so you should do what you would be doing if those places threw up a hard paywall that requires a subscription: don't read their content.

Instead, you go out of your way to take their content for free. Then you complain that the content is shit, and finally, you complain that publishers should be making it easier for you to take their shit. OK, sure, whatever. But at least recognize that there are business mechanisms more complicated than "stupid publishing company is using stupid ad network to get money"

[1] http://www.niemanlab.org/2016/01/20-years-ago-today-nytimes-...

[2] https://gigaom.com/2012/02/06/debunking-the-original-sin-of-...

Re: Content is dead

#98

Post by vkb »

return0 wrote: post #11
Swizec wrote: post #7

> today can’t epxect to put out mostly junk filler I wonder if that's a litmus test to see if people finish reading. Great article, perfect sentiment, last paragraph has the only typo in the entire thing. And I totally agree. There are shitloads of people on the internet making money from content. Hell, I make some sometimes. If you build a real audience, listen to them, then solve their problems. Then content isn't…

There is a typo in the first line as well.

Fixed, thanks.

Re: Content is dead

#99

Post by beeboop »

I look forward to the day when media outlets start dying due to lack of ad revenue. 99% of news content is rehashing of existing content done by someone else. Remove the noise and the few real contributors will be easily recognized and supported. Also helps lessen organizational bias when content creators are less beholden to the whims of their billionaire employers.

Re: Content is dead

#100

Post by xemoka »

nuttinwrong wrote: post #79
ebola1717 wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I saw a talk by a product manager at the Guardian, and as I understand it, that transformation was a reaction to declining print sales, shaky ad revenue, the rise of Facebook & Google, the success of sites like Buzzfeed & Vox, etc. They've been losing money for a long time and have been slashing costs as much as they can, but that doesn't make a business sustainable. Nowadays, most people will get to a news article f…

I say let them crash. Let them ALL crash. We don't need no stinking news!

Certainly if that's what they call news and that's how they want to deliver it.
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