41–50 of 111 posts
> 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.
>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,…
A cryptocurrency-backed tipping model (extremely low friction in tipping compared to any non-crypto alternative) is starting to look very promising. Take a look at http://steemit.com/ for instance. It's kind of a Reddit clone based on that model. I think it still only has fewer than 1 million users, which means the quality of the user-generated posts won't be as good even as that from the (much larger) Reddit right n…
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 hav…
Anyway, that is roughly how such a service might work. I am sure that even better safeguards could be designed into it.
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/ .
There are only two ways to break the duopoly: create your own massive medium like Facebook or work with publishers. Having worked in this industry, I think working with publishers is an impossible battle. The whole publishing world is rife with fraud and desperate attempts to increase page views. Most publishers cram their websites with ads. The number of low-content, click-baity websites is just staggering. Sometime…
giantbomb.com (ads + subscription only content) 4chan (I would like someone to explain it more deeply to me, but I think they run their own ads, do they use an outside service?)
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…
Do you think that they would really get "better" for a consumer, or more covert as they become "smarter"? I'd assume the latter.
There are only two ways to break the duopoly: create your own massive medium like Facebook or work with publishers. Having worked in this industry, I think working with publishers is an impossible battle. The whole publishing world is rife with fraud and desperate attempts to increase page views. Most publishers cram their websites with ads. The number of low-content, click-baity websites is just staggering. Sometime…
My site https://officesnapshots.com doesn’t really fit into either of those molds. We sell our own advertising space, self-host it, and use static jpgs for the graphics. The ads are also targeted against the content (office design) and tend to be for products like office furniture. In a roundabout way this targets the readers but only because if they are on the site they are likely interested in learning about new pr…
> 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.
market participants not taking externalities into account. i.e. this transaction benefits both you and me, but doesn't take into account the effect of the transaction on the environment/others
Earlier quoted context omitted.
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.
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…
But no, I'm sure literally everything government does that interacts with the market just creates corruption without sufficient benefit to outweigh any such harm, and it'd be better if we didn't do anything at all. Certainly it's easier to think about politics if we can permanently rule out an entire class of solutions this way, saving us from having to consider and weigh each per se. Bonus points if we can define "liberty" as "fewest things outlawed by government"—measuring that is way easier than trying to figure out the degrees of freedom of action available to ordinary people in practice.