131–140 of 277 posts
It's crazy, that we still do not have something like "Cash" on the internet. A simple, anonymous way to pay 10 cent or so. To use a website or read an article. That would make the world so much better for indie developers. Currently, an indie dev makes orders of magnitude less money per pageview then Google, Facebook and Co. Because those have all that advertising technology and ecosystem that indie devs don't have.…
None of these web monetization efforts address the fact that the pool of [all consumers' discretionary income they'd be willing to spend] is likely a small fraction of the size of [all commercial companies' marketing budgets]. No matter how much you reduce the friction for having people make small tips to websites, there's just significantly less money to go around, so it can never replace advertising revenue. The on…
>The [pool of discretionary income people have to spend on books] is a small fraction of [all commercial companies' marketing budgets], therefore it will always be more profitable to run free bookstores that try to make money by putting ads inside the dustjackets and all along the shelves.
But this obviously isn't true - Barnes and Noble is a thing. Or you could even consider Kindles and the ebook market examples of how this isn't true. It can be far _superior_ in terms of revenue to offer a product that people pay for directly, as opposed to baiting them into a space with ads in it.
I think the mistake came in when you compared all of the marketing budgets combined, (call it M), with all of the discretionary income combined, (D), and took it as axiomatic that D Some more googling tells me that marketing spend from US companies was ~$200 billion in 2018. US consumers spent $14 trillion. So the whole premise strikes me as questionable. Am I missing something?
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Cryptocurrency can do this, but Bitcoin artificially keeps the blocksize to 1.6KB/s so people think that small transactions are not practical in a general sense, since they aren't practical there.
It wouldn't be the best user experience if you had to wait 10 minutes for confirmation. Also by increasing the size of the blocks you increase the orphan rate due to propagation delay which results in needing more confirmations before a transaction is considered truly immutable. Bitcoin has to have a fee market to incentivize miners so that as block rewards decrease the cost of securing the network doesn't shrink as…
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If online advertising went away overnight I'd extend that to all advertising and I think we might be out of this mess permanently. It seems like an insane concept, because advertising is a part of modern life, but I think it's the only way to effectively kill the surveillance/influence peddling hydra. Otherwise, all these efforts just redirect ad dollars to other forms of systems of influence which may be similarly a…
What counts as advertising?
How about this: Any action taken by an individual or organization with the intent of influencing another individual to execute a commercial transaction.
No billboards, TV commercials, newspaper advertisements, hyperbolic statements about products. I'm sure some wacky new loophole would be found, but it would be just that, some wacky loophole, not a massive trillion dollar industry built around manipulation.
Forget micro-payments. Ban web advertising at the browser level. Create a browser that thoroughly and intentionally integrates ad blocking and has a statements of how it renders HTML with UX constraints (think Google AMP but actually good). What happens? Most content sources dry-up and stop. I no longer see that as a bad thing. Out every every 100 content mills that are re-aggregating and summarizing someone else's o…
> What happens? What happens if you do that without enough market share is that the browser gets detected and banned/redirected with a message about it being hostile to the people making the content. To some degree, they would be correct. If chrome, Firefox and Safari all did that all at once, many web properties would go under before the dust settled. It would probably cause a recession with how many people it affec…
I still think that this is a situation where the bandaid/knife needs to be pulled off quickly. Chrome will never go that path voluntarily but you could push Safari and Firefox to do so (unlikely).
I've worked with publishers big and small and I know where this would hurt the most with smaller sites shuttering.
That said, after working in advertising for over a decade its clear to me that it is manipulative, abused, and ultimately harmful and directly/indirectly funding several hateful voices that have influence on the world.
None of these web monetization efforts address the fact that the pool of [all consumers' discretionary income they'd be willing to spend] is likely a small fraction of the size of [all commercial companies' marketing budgets]. No matter how much you reduce the friction for having people make small tips to websites, there's just significantly less money to go around, so it can never replace advertising revenue. The on…
This kind of seems like a troubling insight at first glance, but it doesn't pass basic sanity checks imo. You could make the same exact argument about any other type of industry. Watch: >The [pool of discretionary income people have to spend on books] is a small fraction of [all commercial companies' marketing budgets], therefore it will always be more profitable to run free bookstores that try to make money by putti…
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That first sentence took me a little while to wrap my head around and I don't think it's true or logical. In other words, even if it was true, I don't see why it matters. I'm building a company that plans to charge people to read things. The reading experience, without ads, is superior. It's worth paying for. That means that an ad free future is possible.
You may think it's worth paying for, but your average consume will not. It makes sense from a consumer point of view, how am I to know if this "superior" experience is worth my money if I haven't tried it. How do I know it will stay that way, lots of magazines and newspapers quality tanked after they got high subscription numbers.
"And just how are we to know for _sure_ that this trumped up restaurant is truly superior?"
In other words, this is how capitalism works. Businesses and vendors make value propositions, then people take chances on them. It works for every single other class of good, but for some reason the big brains that run the internet can't wrap their head around how it would work for them.
Some people have understood this, and they're making a killing from it. For instance, which do you watch more of, HBO, Hulu, Prime and Netflix or broadcast TV? Tons and tons of people are happy to shell out cash for products they consider worth it.
Newspapers and magazines have tried to convince us that these asshole millenials refuse to pay for things anymore, but what they mean is they refuse to pay for shitty things. They're actually perfectly happy to OVERpay for things they like. It just turns out newspapers and magazines aren't, you know, worth that much.
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This kind of seems like a troubling insight at first glance, but it doesn't pass basic sanity checks imo. You could make the same exact argument about any other type of industry. Watch: >The [pool of discretionary income people have to spend on books] is a small fraction of [all commercial companies' marketing budgets], therefore it will always be more profitable to run free bookstores that try to make money by putti…
Your argument breaks down when you consider the thing that allows newspaper/web ads to be profitable is the cost of delivery effectively being reduced to zero, whereas a book still has massive printing costs that cannot be scaled as well (thousands of the same books vs. millions of the same newspapers/page views)
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What counts as advertising?
This is the same as saying "Define Pornography." You're asking for a bulletproof formula that doesn't exist. That doesn't mean we can't take a pretty good bite out of it. How about this: Any action taken by an individual or organization with the intent of influencing another individual to execute a commercial transaction. No billboards, TV commercials, newspaper advertisements, hyperbolic statements about products. I…
That definition pretty much boils down to every interaction between businesses and individuals, ever. Any kind of negotiating or sales or communication..
There's nothing new here. Micropayments have been tried countless times. We did it ourselves and came to the same conclusions that people just don't value content highly nor want to pay for it at any sustainable rate. [1] Advertising is faster, easier, more passive, and more egalitarian than direct payments. Many people you might not consider (like billions around the world) are happy to view ads in exchange for free…
Why wouldn't these two approached work in parallel ? An ad-free experience for those willing to pay and an ad supported one for those who don't. I'm sure there are nuances like the politics you mention in your linked comment. Just curious why.
The cable-bundle approach to content might get more traction but there are too many competing bundles adding fatigue (just like video streaming), on top of the fact that people don't value general content the same as music or movies so the rates are inconsequential compared to ads.