21–30 of 226 posts
Which raises more interesting questions: how will this next generation of content producers monetize content, and will they be doing it for a living like the publishers of today?
I'm going to keep repeating this because everyone seems to frame the debate in the wrong terms. Ad blocking for me is not about speed or security. Those are just nice side effects. It is also not because I do not want to pay. I don't mind paying. It is because when I'm in the middle of something I do not want to be told to pay someone else for goods I do not need. I don't care how unobtrusive it is (well, if it's onl…
If you had a plugin that simply blanked the entire page if it contained advertising you'd be acting in a principled fashion aligned with your preferences. As it is you want to have your cake and eat it too. It may be legal and technically possible, but isn't ethical. I'm reminded of the debates that raged on the internet when Napster was around. All the people downloading music strenuously claimed that the industry m…
Which would be a good model, too, for "free but we need our salary paid" content.
This article assumes that advertisers can get more sophisticated than blockers - I don't agree. With good enough technology, any logo can be snipped out or scribbled over. Any inline, self hosted image can be recognized and removed. Perhaps in future, adblockers will comb through the text of pages and the frames of video and your hero will be drinking "soda" instead of . Heck, one of these days, I want ad blocking gl…
I've been trying out Google Contributor of late. It's not perfect, but it's the first practical micropayment service I've been able to use. If we want good content, we have to be willing to pay for it.
I don't think good content necessarily needs to be paid for. Much of the best content on the web is created as a hobby, with no attempt to monetize, like dr-iguana.com (and countless others.) Other awesome ad-free content is created to promote retail within the same company, like sparkfun.com. It seems to me the ease of monetization with ad-networks drive ultra-low quality content like about.com, though even I must a…
I felt that way for a long time. I am basically living that philosophy. My blog[1] has always been free to read and free from ads. I wrote a book[2], and you can read the entire thing online for free, again with no ads. Almost all the code I write is open source.
I imagined a utopia where all kinds of creative people would have enough free time to pursue their hobbies and share the fruits of their labor. I am lucky enough to basically live that utopia now—I happen to love programming, which is a very lucrative field.
It's fine to dream of a world where my personal utopia is more widely available, but that world isn't here today. You can think of a culture or society as the aggregate sum of all of its shared creative works.
When creative works can only be done by those who can afford the leisure, it skews society towards the perspective of the rich. Think back to 19th century English literature and how few novels there are that show how regular working-class people lived. That's because regular working-class people back then were too busy working in the mines to write a book.
There are some counterexamples, sure, but even most of those were created by rich people observing the poor from a distance. As sympathetic as Dickens was towards the poor, the stories he tells are still different from what an actual poor person would tell.
You can see this happening in the US now. Over the past thirty years, the middle class has gradually gotten sucked dry. Here's a fun game: try to find a wide release Hollywood movie where the main characters are "middle class" and where the sets actually resemble a real middle-class life.
The most striking example I've seen was "This is 40". There, every single dramatic point of the film was about money problems, and yet the characters lived in a giant mansion, drove two late model high end cars, and threw an enormous outdoor catered birthday party, all without, apparently, any irony or self-awareness.
This is because many of the people producing creative works today are out of touch with how the increasingly large number of poor people live. And the poor people are too worked to the bone to contribute their own story.
The end result is increased ignorance about how the bottom half (hell, 90%) of the world lives, and that ignorance is what leads to many of the structural problems causing increased economic disparity.
If we're going to help the poor and increase equality, we need to hear their stories. And we won't do that if they can't afford the time to share them.
[1]: http://journal.stuffwithstuff.com/ [2]: http://gameprogrammingpatterns.com/
The world of online advertising is a fantastic way to study the possible downsides of no regulations.
I'm going to keep repeating this because everyone seems to frame the debate in the wrong terms. Ad blocking for me is not about speed or security. Those are just nice side effects. It is also not because I do not want to pay. I don't mind paying. It is because when I'm in the middle of something I do not want to be told to pay someone else for goods I do not need. I don't care how unobtrusive it is (well, if it's onl…
If you had a plugin that simply blanked the entire page if it contained advertising you'd be acting in a principled fashion aligned with your preferences. As it is you want to have your cake and eat it too. It may be legal and technically possible, but isn't ethical. I'm reminded of the debates that raged on the internet when Napster was around. All the people downloading music strenuously claimed that the industry m…
Maybe scaling native advertising might hire more people than robotizing the whole affair the way it is now.
Native advertising is probably the worst kind of advertising. If I see a website or magazine publish an "advertorial", I'm never going to trust anything they publish from then on. It completely undermines credibility and only makes sense as a last-ditch moneygrab. It's not even worth blocking because it's a useful red flag.
I'm going to keep repeating this because everyone seems to frame the debate in the wrong terms. Ad blocking for me is not about speed or security. Those are just nice side effects. It is also not because I do not want to pay. I don't mind paying. It is because when I'm in the middle of something I do not want to be told to pay someone else for goods I do not need. I don't care how unobtrusive it is (well, if it's onl…
If you had a plugin that simply blanked the entire page if it contained advertising you'd be acting in a principled fashion aligned with your preferences. As it is you want to have your cake and eat it too. It may be legal and technically possible, but isn't ethical. I'm reminded of the debates that raged on the internet when Napster was around. All the people downloading music strenuously claimed that the industry m…
Most people now pay for their music through iTunes, easily-accessible YouTube channels, Patreon, or Satellite XM radio.
So I'd say they found new models - and they're working.
The issue with music was a different one (accessibility/distribution) and not a privacy-concerned one. So it doesn't quite fit. But they were able to change their business model to accommodate.
Now it's "change your business model or die." for another industry.
I use Adblock and I don't mind disabling it for sites that provide quality content or reading materials. There has to be a balance which is sometimes abused by the sites. For example if you go to nfl.com to watch a 30 second play most likely you will end up watching a commercial right before that like as if they don't make enough money with Superbowl commercials. On other hand I don't mind watching a small commercial…
I've been trying out Google Contributor of late. It's not perfect, but it's the first practical micropayment service I've been able to use. If we want good content, we have to be willing to pay for it.
Not even mentioning the fact that it only works on a minority of ads, the green boxes are even more annoying than the ads were.