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Who's doing this to my internet?

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Re: Who's doing this to my internet?

#171

Post by erglkjahlkh »

golergka wrote: post #52

Users. Users always talk that they would love to pay. The problem is, they never do. They blog and write on forums about what they would like to see, but the things they write are always very, very different from what they actually do, according to the data. You remember how in this whole Reddit debacle Pao said that "most of users don't really care about this scandal" and got downvoted to hell? It could very well be…

Taking a look at Alexa, the trend for Reddit has been and still after the "Pao debacle" is upwards. They are constantly getting new users, probably much more than what they lost. So from the viewpoint of the management all is well. These new users are also probably more susceptible to their monetizing efforts.

The fact that Reddit has in the last 6 months lost most of their high quality content creators does not seem to concern them.

Re: Who's doing this to my internet?

#172

Post by logfromblammo »

bryondowd wrote: post #64
woofyman wrote: post #16

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A 45 RPM single in 1962 was $1.00. That would be $5.60 adjusted for inflation today.

I worked for a company that made CDs for independent artists, and started selling Vinyl (didn't manufacture those in house, though). Vinyl is expensive to make, and heavy and expensive to ship. So I'd guess the vast majority of that cost would be eaten up in raw manufacturing and shipping costs, without even talking about middleman costs. And if I recall, our margin was pretty small.

Just last weekend, I saw the episode of "How It's Made" on Science Channel that covered vinyl pressed records.

Here's a comparison of the processes.

Vinyl:

  - Manufacture lacquered master discs (50% QC rejection rate!)
  - Ship lacquered discs to recording studio
  - Put master in recording machine
  - Cut test groove
  - Inspect with built-in microscope
  - Cut lead-in
  - Cut audio tracks, in 2-channel stereo
  - Cut lead-out, label master by hand
  - Ship back to factory
  - Use chemical process to create nickel-silver negative
  - Peel metal negative off lacquered disc
  - Manually find center with microscope
  - Center-punch and trim metal master
  - Use metal master to stamp out vinyl disc copies
  - Ship heavy discs to distributors
Digital:

  - Press "record", press "stop"
  - Upload raw audio tracks to studio file server
  - Sequence and mix raw audio into master song track
  - Assemble album
  - Add metadata
  - Re-encode master tracks to consumer quality
  - Upload to distributor's server
The capital requirements for digital recording are very low now, having benefited from Moore's Law. If you can buy just one high-quality microphone and one decent laptop, and invest a whole lot of your own time, you can single-handedly produce an album with quality comparable to the best studio recordings of the vinyl era.

While Bobby McFerrin is the first person that I am aware of who did this, some artists will record separate tracks of themselves performing every part of a song, and painstakingly assemble the result in the studio to make their album. Then they hire other people to play those parts at live performances, or just leave some parts out.

In the vinyl era, you needed session musicians on staff at the studio. If someone screwed up, you couldn't easily re-record just that track. You usually had to re-do the whole thing.

So there are good reasons why music was relatively more expensive back then. Those reasons no longer apply.

Re: Who's doing this to my internet?

#173

Post by mratzloff »

So, to be clear, you are a self-described "music connoisseur" who is unwilling to support the artists you claim to love at any point while their content is freely available, yet you claim that you would be willing to pay for a subscription model. Yet when you feel that content is at risk you are also unwilling to pay if access to their music is not instant and the cost is marginally more than nothing.

You are a net-negative fan. Your support does nothing for the artists and, until recently, costs SoundCloud money. When SoundCloud adjusts their business to account for users like yourself, you complain publicly with a shakily-supported premise that I believe is actually more a complaint about digital things having a cost.

When I like a band or an artist, I buy their albums on CD or MP3. There's even an independent record store I like near my house, one of the last, and I frequently buy from there, because their existence enriches my life and the community. If an artist is on Bandcamp, I buy through Bandcamp and usually give more than the minimum because I know Bandcamp gets a cut and because I work in technology and have the money to do so.

If you don't like the ads, buy the music and listen whenever you want. Don't be a net-negative fan and then complain when you are treated as such.

Re: Who's doing this to my internet?

#174

Post by Decade »

csense wrote: post #138
vkb wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Everyone is chiming in on this point, so I don't think I wrote it clearly enough. I would be willing to pay $1.50 for a song if it were through a known party, like Amazon Payments or PayPal. I've bought lots of music through Amazon. I'm not going to risk $1.50 to an unknown website. Additionally, my expectations as a consumer have been set to pay 99 cents per track, so to me, in the current atmosphere, $1.50 seems li…

> I'm not going to risk $1.50 to an unknown website. This is why people need Bitcoin.

A couple years ago, I bought 1 week of Soylent with Bitcoin.

Last year, I bought another batch. No more Bitcoin, but at least they accepted Paypal.

Now I’m looking to buy another batch, but they are asking me to trust them with another copy of my debit card. No deal. Back to 100%FOOD.

I pay cash for everyday stuff. After the Monoprice hacks, and then the Target hacks, I’ve become extremely leery of giving my payment information away. I’m looking for a big payoff, like being able to pay at multiple vendors, and I’m looking for a well-defended infrastructure that will definitely let me know if it gets breached.

Re: Who's doing this to my internet?

#175

Post by macintux »

sillygeese wrote: post #117
shawabawa3 wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> $1.50 isn't much of a risk you know, even if you don't know the website. You'd probably even get the song! The $1.50 itself isn't the risk, it's how you pay for it - by entering your card details you let them charge you whatever they want whenever they want

They just might accept PayPal though.

And of course everyone trusts that PayPal won't be hacked. /s

Re: Who's doing this to my internet?

#176

Post by dmschulman »

CrLf wrote: post #73
dmschulman wrote: post #29

Here's a radical idea: pay for the services you love to use. The author mentions she pays for an NYTimes subscription presumably because she gets a lot of value from their content. I pony up the same for a handful of websites and services that I choose to support. It's certainly not a democracy but there is some logic to "voting with your wallet". I hate ads as much as the next person but one thing I hate even more i…

"Here's a radical idea: pay for the services you love to use." Here's another radical idea: trying to understand why people are unwilling to pay. To me it's pretty obvious. People don't value those things they're supposed to "love" enough to pay for them. They don't actually "love" them, they're just induced necessities. If the whole Internet was turned into a pay-it-or-leave-it model, I wouldn't be surprised if most…

Feeling value in intangible products (articles, music streaming, etc) is definitely the crux of the problem. If we can't hold it in our hands (not to mention we've grown accustom to getting all this content for free) it's quite a sales pitch to get someone to start paying for that. Finding that content valuable and feeling like you're supporting those creators is one of the few appeals I can think of to convert a free user.

I think it's important to also recognize that many of these services are just convenient alternatives to other modes of consumption (streaming Soundcloud vs playing a mix CD in your car). That being said, it's alarming to realize how the web has evolved to embrace these walled gardens and that ad-supported models will become more perversive despite the terrible user experience (and the consequences it has for open web).

Re: Who's doing this to my internet?

#177

Post by eevilspock »

josh2600 wrote: post #162
eevilspock wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.” – Upton Sinclair You're putting all the responsibility on the consumer, and none on us, the technologists, the so-called innovators. Where are our innovative powers to come up with alternate busniness models? Where are our backbones to stand up against selling out the internet so that we can get rich quick? B…

I find comments like this to be sorta akin to putting your fingers in your ears and screaming "lalalalala I can't hear you!". Whenever people say "free" in the context of information exchange, my belief is that they fundamentally misunderstand the nature of information. Information is a proxy for power, and the power comes from asymmetry. If everyone has a level playing field from an information access perspective, y…

I made a mistake by ending my comment with:

> The author nails it at the end:

> "There have to be other business models that free up the internet for what it was meant for: free exchange of information.”

I'm with you. People need to get paid.

I'm only calling for coming up with better business models or go back to the straight up "charge for it" model that the free market system is built on. The bit about "free up the internet for what it was meant for: free exchange of information" is not my point, though we do need to come up with a business model that gets people paid but also let's the information that is the lifeblood of democracy flow freely to all people regardless of ability to pay. You focused on a red herring (though it was my fault to put it there, and I've deleted it, thank you). Now please address my points about the ills of advertising.

(P.S. We'll leave to another day the question of whether "It is always subsidized by the rich and powerful" or whether the rich and powerful are in fact subsidized by the people at the bottom, whom you consider the recipients of "charity".)

Re: Who's doing this to my internet?

#178

Post by warfangle »

Aqueous wrote: post #63
icebraining wrote: post #7

Another song I loved by an artist I loved was available for sale, but on a tiny third-party music distribution site I'd never heard of, and for $1.50. $1.50 is a lot to pay for a song And then OP wonders why everyone is making free services plastered with ads instead of charging.

I get what you're saying but that doesn't answer why a hybrid model isn't more common than it is. Show me ads to monetize my free consumption of your service, but if I'm willing to pay (as many definitely are), allow me to subscribe to disable the ads. Why isn't this model more common? Is it because advertisers tend not to want to advertise on a platform where people can opt out of their ads?

Disclaimer: I'm making an educated guess here.

Most non-text media sites sell advertising directly, because most of the on-demand ad networks / platforms that provide a real-time auction are simply too slow. I've seen ad stacks that spend over 4 seconds determining which on-demand ad network will fulfill the view - usually accomplished via VAST chaining. VAST 'tags' are xml manifests for an advertisement, and can contain links to other VAST tags in lieu of supplying the ad unit data directly - and each hop on the VAST tag has the chance to drop a cookie on you.

Because ad networks suck for the user, selling direct advertisements is better. Because ad networks suck for CPM, selling direct advertisements is better.

Two primary metrics used to directly sell direct advertisement is viewership and consistency. Advertisers not only want to buy lots and lots of eyeballs, they want to be sure the entity selling those eyeballs can actually fulfill the desired number of eyeballs. The details of an ad buy can take quite some time to work out.

If the cost in man-hours to work a deal for $X eyeballs is more than CPM*($X/100), a company won't even try to sell the deal. Likewise, if the benefit of having $X eyeballs view your advertisement is less than the cost of your ad buy team's time plus the cost of the advertisement itself, you won't buy that placement. Since the ad buy team and the ad sales team's efforts are fairly constant with respect to the size of the deal, small deals are verboten - on both sides of the table.

And if you've got subscribers that don't see ads, that's leverage you don't have when you're trying to sell ads. And since your subscribers are probably more affluent, they're the audience your advertisers probably want to subscribe to anyways.

As soon as 'Ads' becomes the primary revenue driver (unless you're an advertising company), you've failed. IMHO.

Re: Who's doing this to my internet?

#179

Post by dmschulman »

grokas wrote: post #55
dmschulman wrote: post #29

Here's a radical idea: pay for the services you love to use. The author mentions she pays for an NYTimes subscription presumably because she gets a lot of value from their content. I pony up the same for a handful of websites and services that I choose to support. It's certainly not a democracy but there is some logic to "voting with your wallet". I hate ads as much as the next person but one thing I hate even more i…

| "Voting with your wallet" Oddly enough thats exactly how our 'democracy' works... what would it be without political donations? Back to the point though, if you want to make something free forever, buy it outright one time and its yours for the keeping... Subscription services like buying a car then going to TitleMax and giving them the title, wait for them to take your car away when you can't pay.

In a big D Democracy, you're correct. I don't consider the modern web to be a big D Democracy though.

Re: Who's doing this to my internet?

#180

Post by david-given »

yc1010 wrote: post #107
mcv wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The credit card situation is a completely separate concern, but a very big one. I still don't understand why there's no better international online payment method. There's a great Dutch online payment method, but that's only used by Dutch sites and a few really big ones (like Steam) that can afford to implement national payment systems. Why that system hasn't been implemented on a larger scale, I still don't know.

There is a better and safer online payment method its called Bitcoin But the existing financial and payment companies realize that this new technology makes them largely redundant hence they lobby and make it hard to acquire bitcoin for the average person with existing payment methods. The attitude of banks and regulators towards bitcoin is the same of the motor industry and governments towards the electric car, some…

Last time I looked at Bitcoin, the big show-stoppers for me were:

(a) the price was so variable that there was no way to know how much I was actually going to pay for anything;

(b) turning real money to Bitcoin and back again was an utterly horrible experience (and expensive);

(c) total lack of any recourse against fraud or theft, plus a rather scary security track record.

Have these got any better recently?

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