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The correct amount of ads is zero

manuelmoreale.com

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Re: The correct amount of ads is zero

#351

Post by ToucanLoucan »

eterevsky wrote: post #345
shortformblog wrote: post #265

Stances like this probably feel good to write out, but they miss the reality that when running a media business, relying on one revenue stream is dangerous. That’s why newspapers had classified ads, even though they charged a nominal fee to subscribe. People won’t pay $5 a day to subscribe to a newspaper, but the ads subsidize enough of it to make it so that a paid subscription is accessible to more people. On the in…

It is always possible to have several tiers of subscriptions, a cheap tier with some additional feature and ads, and a higher tier with no ads at all. I am perfectly willing to pay extra to support a website or service that I'm using, but only if it removes all ads.

The problem is: advertisers will argue that if you're offering a tier of service that removes ads, that's specifically going to be the most appealing to the group of your user-base that has the most money to spend and whom is most ready to spend it, evidenced by the fact that they have subscribed to your ad-free tier, and is therefore worth the most in terms of reaching with ads. Those people are self-selecting as the most responsive to being appealed to to buy things, which is what your advertisers want.

This is why the "subscribe to remove ads" thing never took off in a big way. Users love it, but advertisers hate it and it craters the value of the ad space you sell to whomever doesn't think it's worth it/can't afford it.

Re: The correct amount of ads is zero

#352

Post by eqvinox »

shortformblog wrote: post #297
eqvinox wrote: post #280

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're missing the point. There's a reasonable number of people who are willing to pay for content like this, but only if they actually get an ad-free experience in exchange. The business decision The Verge needs to make is whether they want to try to reach these people or not, since these people won't pay for a model that still has ads. (There could of course be 2 subscription levels at different prices, one…

I am not missing the point. Rather, the point is so small as to not be financially worth it for them. I am saying that The Verge made a business decision to balance ad load and subscriber cost to potentially bring in more subscribers. They probably did the math and realized that charging people $15 a month would not bring in many subscribers, and that they could have charged $5 a month with regular ad load, but they…

I'd say that the range of actual consumer behavior is quite wide on this. I wonder if anyone has actual public numbers from any kind of similar situation (which, yes, isn't going to be comparable anyway, but anything even remotely close would be interesting.)

From my personal bubble, I know there's a bunch of people that won't even consider a subscription that still contains ads; it's antithetical to their (and my) expectations. Whether they'd subscribe to an ad-free The Verge I don't know either; personally I don't consume The Verge aside from occasionally getting sent a link or two, so I wouldn't. I will also say that, were I interested in any Amazon Prime Video show that has ads, I'd rather torrent it.

(I do pay for Nebula and Dropout, so no, I'm not a "would never pay for any subscription anyway" person.)

Re: The correct amount of ads is zero

#353

Post by ToucanLoucan »

PaulHoule wrote: post #344
xixixao wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The richest people, hence the most valuable for advertisers, would buy it. This significantly affects the whole ad business value. Such that the ad-free tier would have to be priced too high. It’s more profitable to “force” everyone to watch ads. I’m afraid.

Yep. Elephant in the room of media economics. Look at ads on daytime broadcast TV and it is: medicare advantage, something you can get from medicare, a medicare scam, personal injury lawyer, some drug your insurance might pay for, personal injury lawyer #2. Ads for something you spend your own money on are few and far between (maybe you will get a car ad because if nobody bought a car who'd get hit by a car and call…

You see the same effect with twitter's advertiser exodus since it was acquired. It was not long ago you'd see everything on twitter: prominent fashion brands, car companies, big name electronics, everything you'd expect from a healthy ad ecosystem. Now it's basically nothing but crypto scams, reverse mortgages, supplements, dude wipes and pills that make your dick work.

Like you can feel whatever you feel about that, but it's a clear, marked shift.

Re: The correct amount of ads is zero

#354

Post by nubinetwork »

shortformblog wrote: post #265

Stances like this probably feel good to write out, but they miss the reality that when running a media business, relying on one revenue stream is dangerous. That’s why newspapers had classified ads, even though they charged a nominal fee to subscribe. People won’t pay $5 a day to subscribe to a newspaper, but the ads subsidize enough of it to make it so that a paid subscription is accessible to more people. On the in…

Freemium gets abused, just look at YouTube... give them money and they still run ads...

Re: The correct amount of ads is zero

#356

Post by RcouF1uZ4gsC »

shortformblog wrote: post #265

Stances like this probably feel good to write out, but they miss the reality that when running a media business, relying on one revenue stream is dangerous. That’s why newspapers had classified ads, even though they charged a nominal fee to subscribe. People won’t pay $5 a day to subscribe to a newspaper, but the ads subsidize enough of it to make it so that a paid subscription is accessible to more people. On the in…

> That’s why newspapers had classified ads, even though they charged a nominal fee to subscribe.

Which leads to the conclusion that the company that most disrupted the newspaper industry was not Google or Facebook but Craigslist.

Re: The correct amount of ads is zero

#357

Post by jonplackett »

Amazon prime video is also double dipping now. So annoying!

And they have the cheek to say ‘your program will resume uninterrupted’. You literally just interrupted it!

It’s like slapping someone in the face and then smugly exclaiming ‘and that’s the end of the slaps - you must be so happy, right?’

Re: The correct amount of ads is zero

#358

Post by galfarragem »

The correct amount of ads is one.

As an indie web developer, after trying many "ad policies", I believe the sweet spot (not the revenue optimal spot!) is one ad, clear, not intrusive and highly targetted to your audience. This ad will not annoy readers and will keep your motivation at a decent level (instead of a zero ads policy).

My take: https://www.slowernews.com/sponsor

Re: The correct amount of ads is zero

#359

Post by ekwav »

notpushkin wrote: post #73
paxys wrote: post #51

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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).

They already do something similar called open connect https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/ I am pretty sure the biggest cost is licensing. Also why you see Netflix producing so much original content.

Re: The correct amount of ads is zero

#360

Post by ulrikrasmussen »

jillesvangurp wrote: post #347
ulrikrasmussen wrote: post #97

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You can use uBlock and pay your content creators via Patreon if they have one. I believe that the ad-based freemium business model is harmful to society and unfixable due to the incentives it creates to engage and enrage rather than entertain and inform. So, I use uBlock to use YouTube for free to explicitly drain it of resources without giving Google any ad income, and then I pay the creators that I like using other…

I'm not a big believer in this. It simply doesn't scale. So I might donate chunks of income to 1, 2, maybe 5 or 10 people like this. What about everyone else? It's not a fair system. I engage with lots of youtube channels, read lots of things on dozens/hundreds of websites. Add a few podcasts to the mix and it starts adding up to quite a lot of mouths to feed with individual donations. It's not reasonable for all of…

Spotify doesn't solve that problem at all, it just helps you avoid feeling bad about it. I know artists who sell their music on both Bandcamp and on Spotify, and they all say that their income from Spotify is utterly insignificant unless you are already a big and established name with lots and lots of streams.

You are not the only one consuming a given podcast or YouTube channel, and even if you don't subscribe to their Patreon, maybe someone who likes it even more will. Sure, some content creators will not get enough income to continue, but is that really a big problem? We have no shortage of musicians, blog authors and podcasters, and if you don't care enough about a podcast to give a little bit of money to it, then maybe you won't miss it that much if it disappears.

Advocating for a different market structure than the ad-tech fueled one will of course change the supply side and I am not claiming otherwise. I just don't think it's necessarily going to be a problem, on the contrary it will optimize for content that people love rather than content that just stimulates them.

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