81–90 of 126 posts
A better paradigm has to come.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Isn't that a false dichotomy? You left out completely free content, which is still abundant and could hold your attention each and every day. It seems most ad-driven sites are fueled by screen scraping or opining on external content without adding much value.
Not really. Decent writers cost money. Editors cost money. Fact checkers cost money. Are there people who will write about their hobby for free, and produce good quality content? Sure. At the same time, many things require feet (and equipment) on the ground, on location, and that, again, costs money.
Yours is an interesting quality comment that I can read for free in a site without advertisement. The same goes for the rest of my news readings online. The links lead me to other pages that Privoxy makes bearable.
I read (paid) books, soon eBooks, for anything but news. I guess the question is what kind of content people consume.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Certainly by those standards, the Youtube link you supplied is a back button. I wonder if you do find anything readable outside of HN these days ;-)
I'm pretty certain that YouTube links are not "unexpected video." Perhaps it's flash, but I think the original means an entirely flash-navigated site.
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I'm still hoping that something like Flattr can work. It should be possible to have a middle ground between "everything is ad supported" and "everything requires subscriptions or credit cards", especially for niche "small" content (that don't take months or years to produce) where the audience can appreciate the work done and its value.
I hope Flattr or one of the others like it can work, but I think the habits of people who are now used to things being free, and who aren't likely to en-mass start voluntarily "tipping" authors, will be hard to change.
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In practice, it seems that advertiser dollars always trump subscriber fees.
I am hopeful that as the providers become more directly connected to the consumers and it becomes increasingly feasible to deal with them directly, instead of at an arms length in aggregate as was the only option up until now, that we can cut out what is ultimately functioning as a middleman in the relationship, the advertiser. You know how the internet feels about middlemen than aren't adding much value. Even if I j…
What I'd really like to see is a "real" news website that supplies non-biased news written by real investigative journalists with no advertisements. I'd pay handsomely for that.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
I'm pretty certain that YouTube links are not "unexpected video." Perhaps it's flash, but I think the original means an entirely flash-navigated site.
But the new YouTube ads that play before video are unexpected. And, for me, quite often a back button. After 6 seconds of watching the ad I usually don't care about the video anymore :/ (call it short attention span).
Why don't we start by trying to raise the quality and therefore effectiveness of ads on the Internet? A fundamental shift in how ads work and what they're trying to do needs to be done. The ads you see on websites right now are remnants from the newspaper, nearly identical to their print counterparts. Creating a "prettier ad network" or "other way to be profitable" is only patchwork. We need to completely rework the…
"Solving this" implies that there are users who like, value, and want advertising. I don't feel that there are that many people who do. The better thing to solve is "how can websites make money without ads"? How did TV networks stay on the air before commercial breaks? Maybe a similar model can be applied.
Why don't we start by trying to raise the quality and therefore effectiveness of ads on the Internet? A fundamental shift in how ads work and what they're trying to do needs to be done. The ads you see on websites right now are remnants from the newspaper, nearly identical to their print counterparts. Creating a "prettier ad network" or "other way to be profitable" is only patchwork. We need to completely rework the…
"Solving this" implies that there are users who like, value, and want advertising. I don't feel that there are that many people who do. The better thing to solve is "how can websites make money without ads"? How did TV networks stay on the air before commercial breaks? Maybe a similar model can be applied.
It's gotten so bad I've created a web site that gives me plain headlines of all the tech, science, world, sports, and political stories I might want to read. Phase 2 is walking the links and using something like Readability to make those readable as well. http://newspaper23.com
I didn't do this as a for-profit startup kind of thing -- it's for my own sanity. Everywhere you go folks are screwing with you instead of just giving you content. I wanted a place I could go to just catch up quickly on the opinion of the day. No bullshit.
I also feel like it is a mistake to blame this on SEO. SEO has nothing to do with it. I have a few sites optimized for SEO myself, and the only thing I want to do is present plain, simple, easy-to-understand text. How else would people easily consume it and recommend it to others?
Nope, the problem is stickiness. Everybody wants their site to be sticky and entertaining -- to the point of popping up email sign-ups, ads, social crap, you name it. SEO just means getting people to visit. Believe me, the last thing you want to do is annoy them. It's the folks who already have large audiences that are crapping all over the net. And they're not doing that for new eyeballs, they're doing that to keep the eyeballs they already have -- it's called engagement. Content providers make a clear and decisive design statement when they decide to screw over readability for stickiness. (Yes, some small-traffic sites do this, but only because they could care less about the audience in the first place. Any visitor for them is a mark. These are the guys who are never going to grow and stay big and simply don't care.)
So there is a concept, that you can't tell people about, they have to experience it, then they "get it."
Small anecdote, when I left Sun in 1995 I went to a startup called "GolfWeb" which was publishing an online magazine about Golf. I saw the web as the new world of publishing (I was waaaaaaaaay early :-)) and had plans for a micropayments type Java wallet applet that would allow you read articles and consume content like you did with a regular magazine only better since you only paid for the articles you read, and you didn't have to store back issues they were always online. There were three problems with this vision:
1) Technical users of the time were chanting "information wants to be free" and were rabidly opposed to paying for content.
2) Nearly nobody had Java in their browser yet, so supporting this meant a very small market to work from.
3) DigiCash and David Chaum had a bunch of patents on electronic versions of cash transactions and they didn't have a clue about 'reasonable' licensing.
[Trust me, in 2015 after all that crap expires, we're going to have some really useful tools available.]
So Golfweb, like others, turned to putting banner ads on the pages and using that to pay the bills.
Information has value. This may seem obvious but for a number of people it is not. The question is how do you convert 'demand' type value into something fungible like cash.
The easiest way has been selling people who want to contact people who would want to consume this particular information, an opportunity to make their case. Sort of like giving lions a seat at the watering hole where gazelles come to drink. The lions pay more for seats near a good quality watering hole. But the nature of watering holes is that the gazelles, despite their thirst, will not frequent watering holes that are saturated with lions. No gazelles, and the lions lose interest. That is the value transaction of most web sites, selling your 'demographic' to advertisers for a spot on the page. And like our eponymous watering hole, you can screw it up by over doing it. So at the tipping point, the value of the information is higher to the reader, than having access to the reader is to the advertiser. So you switch from selling access to lions to selling gazelles access to a fenced watering hole where there are no lions.
To date however that switch has been limited by our gazelles ability to express a preference. Some sites are experimenting with memberships, others like Kachingle are providing a way to pay authors of good sites (less reliable income that advertising). What is needed will be something which is part payment system, part rights clearinghouse, and part web framework.
I of course bowed out of this particular game until 2015 :-) but its going to come to pass. I pay $12/yr to get a magazine, why not $1/month to a web site to access the new content there? Especially if it means the ad farms are tapered down to something less egregious than the examples given in OP's article. Because it isn't that advertisements are bad 'per se' (I used to get BYTE magazine in part for the advertisements), it is the egregious nature in which publishers try to force them into your face which changes the value proposition negative for the reader. So some content publisher growth, some additional understanding in the advertising world what to expect, and voila we'll have moved off paper for this kind of stuff.