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“Your frustration is the product”

daringfireball.net

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Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#21

Post by Sander_Marechal »

llm_nerd wrote: post #19
huitzitziltzin wrote: post #14

Newspapers have an extremely expensive product. They have to pay for it somehow! You can’t give away an expensive product for free forever! No one on the internet likes paying for access to content. After 35 years we have not found a way to monetize except ad tech. Is that so hard to understand? Every time someone links an article on this website from an expensive print publication, there is immediately a link in the…

>The dialog around ads on HN is extremely low quality This is kind of an ironic comment given that this whole discussion is about visiting the sites as a paying subscriber . I pay for the NYT. If I visit without adblockers, the site is absolutely stuffed with obnoxious amounts of advertising. I mean, of course I use adblockers normally, and it's basically a requirement no matter how much you're willing to pay for eve…

> It's like buy a $2000 TV and discovering ads on the homescreen, ContentID to sell your viewing habits, etc.

Have you bought a TV recently? This is exactly what is happening already. I had to pi-hole my entire network to get rid of the ads in my "switch source" menu on my Samsung TV that did not have ads when I bought it and for the first 3 years after that.

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#22

Post by digitalsushi »

huitzitziltzin wrote: post #14

Newspapers have an extremely expensive product. They have to pay for it somehow! You can’t give away an expensive product for free forever! No one on the internet likes paying for access to content. After 35 years we have not found a way to monetize except ad tech. Is that so hard to understand? Every time someone links an article on this website from an expensive print publication, there is immediately a link in the…

after 30 years of waiting for standard micropayments, I have stopped wondering if it's solvable. I perfectly believe we could have had it working 20 years ago but there's a reason someone doesn't desire it to be.

i also dont know how economics work so maybe paying 2/3 of a cent for a page view is not helpful. Maybe that's why it doesnt work. Maybe I'm in the 1% of people who would pay for ad-free content on a non-subscription model.

I'd rather everything have a price, nothing has a subscription, and everything is a decision to purchase per view instead of funneling into walled garden access per month

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#23

Post by intrasight »

weedhopper wrote: post #20
huitzitziltzin wrote: post #14

Newspapers have an extremely expensive product. They have to pay for it somehow! You can’t give away an expensive product for free forever! No one on the internet likes paying for access to content. After 35 years we have not found a way to monetize except ad tech. Is that so hard to understand? Every time someone links an article on this website from an expensive print publication, there is immediately a link in the…

Exactly, paying for quality content should be normalised. Even a trivial amount - 10-50c. And the reality is that it is unheard of.

I would gladly pay a few cents to read an article. Isn't the problem that no one figured out the business or technical model to accomplish that? I think I remember reading, 10 years ago, that bitcoin would solve that problem.

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#24

Post by maybewhenthesun »

llm_nerd wrote: post #13
rcarr wrote: post #8

> The reader is not respected enough by the software. The reader is not respected by the software because the reader themselves does not respect the software or the article. If the reader paid for a subscription to the website they would get an ad-free version. Don't pay and then this is what you get. The money has to come from somewhere. The issue is that a large portion of the population seems to think that if a pr…

>If the reader paid for a subscription to the website they would get an ad-free version. ? Where is this true? I pay for the NY Times. Logged in to my subscriber account, the front page is 68MB and has a giant Hume band ad filling 1/3 of the screen. Loading an article that contains about 9 paragraphs of text and I have a huge BestBuy banner ad filling the top, and then smaller banner ads interspersed between every pa…

It is true in a historical sense.

People used to all pay for their newspapers. So newspapers had an actual budget apart from ad revenue.

This has largely dried up and nearly all 'newspapers' today need to get their money from ads. Sure, some people subscribe, but it's hardly ever the main income for news organizations (some exceptions notwithstanding, I'm talking about the average news organization here).

On top of that the ad revenue is extremely 'diluted'. Putting an ad in a print newspaper was expensive!.

For an organization who get their main income from ads, tailoring their pages for the few subscribers is hardly worth it.

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#25

Post by someguyorother »

intrasight wrote: post #23
weedhopper wrote: post #20

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exactly, paying for quality content should be normalised. Even a trivial amount - 10-50c. And the reality is that it is unheard of.

I would gladly pay a few cents to read an article. Isn't the problem that no one figured out the business or technical model to accomplish that? I think I remember reading, 10 years ago, that bitcoin would solve that problem.

The mental transaction cost is the hard part. The effort required to decide whether to pay at all is significant enough that payments don't scale down to the micro- level.

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#26

Post by torben-friis »

rcarr wrote: post #8

> The reader is not respected enough by the software. The reader is not respected by the software because the reader themselves does not respect the software or the article. If the reader paid for a subscription to the website they would get an ad-free version. Don't pay and then this is what you get. The money has to come from somewhere. The issue is that a large portion of the population seems to think that if a pr…

Press is a difficult one.

I grew up in a household where several newspapers were bought daily (dad was a journalist himself). I would struggle doing the same though, even if I can very much afford it, because it is very clear to current press that even paying, I'm the product.

There's all sorts of articles that are actually ads, attempts to move me in an ideological direction, information that is in the owner's interest to spread.

Press double dips. If the interest is on distributing ideology, have the parties/lobbies pay.

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#27

Post by red_admiral »

everdrive wrote: post #11

"I went to the New York Times to glimpse at four headlines and was greeted with 422 network requests and 49 megabytes of data." Not really the point of the article, but almost all major news sites are significantly better if you block javascript. You sometimes lose pictures and just get text, but often the pictures are irrelevant anyhow. (a story about a world leader, and some public / stock photo is used and is not…

For "lyric sites" read "ad sites that use lyrics to attract an audience". That's where we are today.

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#28

Post by red_admiral »

rivetfasten wrote: post #18

"... the equivalent of a broadcast TV channel that only showed 7 minutes of actual TV content per hour, devoting the other 53 minutes to paid commercials and promotions ... Almost no one would watch such a channel." QVC exists. That channel is ONLY ads. Not to detract from the point, which seems to be "yes what this other guy said."

Teleshopping channels are a thing, and they have more of an audience than one might guess.

Re: “Your frustration is the product”

#30

Post by red_admiral »

rcarr wrote: post #8

> The reader is not respected enough by the software. The reader is not respected by the software because the reader themselves does not respect the software or the article. If the reader paid for a subscription to the website they would get an ad-free version. Don't pay and then this is what you get. The money has to come from somewhere. The issue is that a large portion of the population seems to think that if a pr…

> We used to pay for things - including the news.

Have newspapers or magazines ever been financially sustainable on sale revenue alone? They've always carried ads, and I suspect that's always been a bigger income stream than the cost of buying the paper itself.

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