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The Digital Advertising Duopoly

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Re: The Digital Advertising Duopoly

#31

Post by nickdandakis »

amoorthy wrote: post #13
jasode wrote: post #11

>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,…

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?

Subscription fatigue, maybe?

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!

Re: The Digital Advertising Duopoly

#32

Post by snowwrestler »

ovao wrote: post #17
weeksie wrote: post #5

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 governm…

> This generation of internet users is a lot more willing to pay for content than mine was. I haven't seen any evidence to suggest this is the case. Do you know of any?

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.

Re: The Digital Advertising Duopoly

#33

Post by killjoywashere »

hackbinary wrote: post #26
pimmen wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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. You're welcome, by the way.

Also, YouTube.

YouTube is from San Mateo

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_YouTube

Re: The Digital Advertising Duopoly

#34

Post by CaptSpify »

brucephillips wrote: post #22

> I don’t want nor do I expect any governmental response to this market failure. Why is it a failure? Price? Quality? Something else? I'm not convinced this is a problem.

How do you not consider people being openly lied to and manipulated on a daily basis anything other than a failure?

Re: The Digital Advertising Duopoly

#35

Post by CaptSpify »

>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.

Re: The Digital Advertising Duopoly

#36

Post by arrosenberg »

alexryan wrote: post #30
nerdponx wrote: post #6

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Isn't that the role of governments in a healthy economy? To step in when markets fail?

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 large…

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.

Re: The Digital Advertising Duopoly

#37

Post by andschwa »

herodotus wrote: post #29

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.

That's kind of the idea behind ORCHID: https://orchidprotocol.com/.

Re: The Digital Advertising Duopoly

#38

Post by harshreality »

herodotus wrote: post #29

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.

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.

Re: The Digital Advertising Duopoly

#39

Post by pjc50 »

wan23 wrote: post #28
brndnmtthws wrote: post #4

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 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 content before even advertising. And we're here creating ""content"" without being paid on a site with no ads.

Re: The Digital Advertising Duopoly

#40

Post by brucephillips »

CaptSpify wrote: post #34
brucephillips wrote: post #22

> I don’t want nor do I expect any governmental response to this market failure. Why is it a failure? Price? Quality? Something else? I'm not convinced this is a problem.

How do you not consider people being openly lied to and manipulated on a daily basis anything other than a failure?

I never said I did. What on earth are you talking about?
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