The Economist has the same problem, they sell you a subscription and then embed animated ads into the content
See, that is why I get the paper version. It still has ads, but they are easily skipped and I can't afford anything they advertise anyway.
The correct amount of ads is zero
71–80 of 611 posts
Re: The correct amount of ads is zero
#72It's why I use Firefox and avoid situations where I might get exposed to annoying ads. I was watching some Amazon Prime recently (the new rings of power season). Pretty OK and completely ad free experience. Except I noticed these weird cuts every few minutes. It took me quite a while to realize that Amazon introduced ads some time ago for Amazon prime and uBlock origin was doing a great job of simply blocking them. H…
You’re making a very different point to the article. The article is about how to pay for content, your point is that you don’t want to pay for content at all.
He does pay for prime. The fact that they have done a bait-n-switch and now _still_ show you adverts, despite you paying, is reprehensible.
Re: The correct amount of ads is zero
#73Earlier quoted context omitted.
The people most likely to pay the extra $1 are the people who will watch the most, and then they'd lose more than $1/mo from them in ad impressions. The real question is, why don't they have a completely free plan supported entirely by ads -- don't even try to get a huge premium for the ads, just sell lots of them, even if it's a 1:1 time relationship between ads and content. And then have another plan where you pay…
Free plans don't work when the cost of providing a service is high. Google, Facebook and the like can happily give away their products for free and lose money on the bottom N% of users, because it still amounts to pennies. Netflix has high bandwidth and content licensing costs that scale per user, so they need some barrier to entry.
Could they offset bandwidth by using torrents? I mean, it works for the pirates, even though there is no way to enforce people keep seeding (apart from private trackers maybe).
Re: The correct amount of ads is zero
#74The Verge staff might have an inflated idea of how many people are truly interested in what they have to say, its no ft.com
Re: The correct amount of ads is zero
#75Earlier quoted context omitted.
You’re making a very different point to the article. The article is about how to pay for content, your point is that you don’t want to pay for content at all.
He does pay for prime. The fact that they have done a bait-n-switch and now _still_ show you adverts, despite you paying, is reprehensible.
Only if they didn't issue that as new Ts & Cs. If they just changed the service he should get his money back for an unagreed change of service.
Re: The correct amount of ads is zero
#76It's why I use Firefox and avoid situations where I might get exposed to annoying ads. I was watching some Amazon Prime recently (the new rings of power season). Pretty OK and completely ad free experience. Except I noticed these weird cuts every few minutes. It took me quite a while to realize that Amazon introduced ads some time ago for Amazon prime and uBlock origin was doing a great job of simply blocking them. H…
Regarding The Verge, I wish something like Apple News existed in this space. I'd happily throw in $10/mo into a pool that distributed money towards a bunch of different smaller tech reporting/blogs/YouTube channels. I just can't justify paying $X/mo individually to 20 different sources. Though, I dislike that Apple News now runs ads in it's offering and would happily pay a little more to completely get rid of them, b…
Then that'd be Apple News Premium, or whatever.
But the curve of how many subscribers need to go premium, how much subscription to charge them and how many/few ads do both sides find acceptable has to be discovered by experimentation (like Netflix's 'Standard with ads' tier).
See also recent articles on "Apple TV+ is a failure despite making great content and $20b investment, Apple is about to make cuts".
(The comparison is not great because premium streaming of original content and long-form text journalism on current affairs are different things with different audiences and pricepoints and viewing patterns.
By the way I only just realized that Netflix releasing Squid Game Season 2 on Dec 26 is probably intentional strategy to reduce January and February cancellations.)
Re: The correct amount of ads is zero
#77It’s not though. Any party is free to shape their offering the way they want. And any other party is free to accept the deal, or not.
That said, paying AND >0 ads (or tracking) is also a no no for me.
Re: The correct amount of ads is zero
#78One big issue is that even if they take ads out they make whole articles ads.
I would pay a fair amount for an ad free news source that has a first rate editorial staff that simply prints the news.
Re: The correct amount of ads is zero
#79This is a bad take. Ads are not the problem. Behavioural ads with suriveillance and data economy is. Static ads or contextual ads are the answer. Some of the best examples I can think of on the top of my head is duckduckgo.com and https://daringfireball.net/feeds/sponsors/ Paywall doesn't stop data surveillance. All the news sites have become paywalled because ads revenue dried up because people installing ad blocker…
Another issue is that content is now being written to accommodate the ads, it's not really value in its own right anymore. So much reporting and writing is terrible, because it's seen as a cost, while the ads are the source of revenue.
Even if you pay to not see the ads, then content won't change and you'll still be served the same "damaged goods". The quality of the writing doesn't go up when you're on the other side of the paywall.
Re: The correct amount of ads is zero
#80Dear friends!
I am a simple programmer. I had a website in 2009, where I posted useful articles. I had a small ad block, which allowed me to pay for my expenses. When users began to install ad blockers en masse, the number of ad views dropped significantly and I had to close the site. Now I have no job and I am very poor. I want to thank those people who not only do not want to pay for good service, but also install ad blockers. Now you say that there is nothing to find on the Internet. Who will do something for you for free? Maybe a taxi driver will take you for free?