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Not really. This is the same as the "stealing causes us to raise prices for other shoppers" misperception. Supply and demand set the prices of products and services. If advertisers could maximize profits by charging more they already would be. Advertisement dollars mainly just come out of profits.
stackoverflow.com fixed ads problem beautifully one designated spotlight, no animations i actually pay attention to them willingly
Here's the reality - We only have 2 options to enable the value exchange of content: direct (via you moving funds to the publisher) or in-direct (monetizing through ads). It's a binary choice. It's one or the other, that's it. There's no magic 3rd option that's available (today).
Here are a few reasons why advertising is still a better model:
- It's fast. Faster than money transfer.
- It's efficient. Money is not cheap to transfer, even today.
- It's passive. No mental energy expended or decision making required.
- It's anonymous. No need for payment details or 3rd party to handle funds.
- It's secure. Again no need for payment information, there's not much ads can do. (Malware is a different problem.)
- It's accessible. Your wealth doesn't determine the amount of content you can get. Everyone can access everything equally.
This is fundamentally a question of human behavior and the common reaction is to take things for free when possible. People just do not value content that highly, if at all. You can already see the reaction to rising rates for netflix and spotify even though they provide so much value, certainly more than an equally priced cup of coffee.
Add to that the amount of willpower and decisioning it requires to judge whether a piece of content is worth it or not and it's clear that this is not a scalable system. Perhaps a "cable subscription" for the internet with time-based billing for each domain might be something that works as a direct-payment option in the future but this is a massive technical, security and privacy challenge the way things are now.
I do agree that ads have gotten out of hand recently - however this is an implementation problem. Regulation and standards and enforcement are what's needed to fix this. It has nothing to do with the ad model itself which is still the most universally scalable and viable monetization system for content.
"Advertisers must pay to publish ads, this results (indirectly) in higher prices of products and services." Not really. This is the same as the "stealing causes us to raise prices for other shoppers" misperception. Supply and demand set the prices of products and services. If advertisers could maximize profits by charging more they already would be. Advertisement dollars mainly just come out of profits.
Costs affect prices because if companies can't make a profit, they stop doing business. Under (near perfect) competition, prices tend to be a bit over cost. Supply and demand may be the mechanism, but costs do indeed come into it.
In many cases though, advertising lowers prices because if you can sell more products, the average cost can be lower because of economies of scale.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
What about public radio and TV? There are some sponsors and government funding, but I think they are largely based on private donations.
http://www.npr.org/about-npr/178660742/public-radio-finances Individuals are the largest single source of funding, but they don't make up the majority of it, at least for NPR. Corporate sponsorship is the next biggest piece, and while it's not very intrusive, AFAIC the sponsorship messages on NPR are basically ads (very tolerable ads, but still ads).
"Advertisers must pay to publish ads, this results (indirectly) in higher prices of products and services." Not really. This is the same as the "stealing causes us to raise prices for other shoppers" misperception. Supply and demand set the prices of products and services. If advertisers could maximize profits by charging more they already would be. Advertisement dollars mainly just come out of profits.
I have a problem with that statement too, but for different reasons. Costs affect prices because if companies can't make a profit, they stop doing business. Under (near perfect) competition, prices tend to be a bit over cost. Supply and demand may be the mechanism, but costs do indeed come into it. In many cases though, advertising lowers prices because if you can sell more products, the average cost can be lower bec…
The cost of marketing (which includes advertising) is usually a small fraction of the overall cost of production for most products and services.
A rationally self-interested person would not donate, because in most cases, their donation would not give them as much benefit as the cost.
The way you'd measure benefit is the value received from the site, times times the chance that their donation makes the difference between the site existing and not existing. That chance is typically a very small number.
Naive articles like this don't bother factoring in what the chance is that your donation will make a difference....in other words they ignore the fact that most people would rather be a freeloader than a sucker.
Ahh yes. Another "ads are bad" post. People always seem to forget that most of the Internet is free BECAUSE of ads.
If your websites serve ads then by definition your content isn't free. As long as you believe that ads actually work and influence people then you are imposing a cost on your users. There are websites which are actually free to end users. They don't serve ads, they might have a donation page, and largely exist because the operator simply wants to publish something. Most of the 'old web' embodies these qualities. The…
Really? Not true because why? You haven't actually provided any real counterexample of a 3rd and better option.
Payment is either direct (funds transferred) or indirect (attention monetized through ads). The podcast you mentioned is just direct (donations, selling books, selling tickets, etc). In fact they seem to make money doing other things for direct payment and do the podcast for free, so it's not even a real business model but rather just a hobby.
> The Internet is quite expensive because of ads.
The internet is incredibly free, open, democratic and accessible because of ads. If you had to pay for the same amount of content consumption your monthly bill would likely be in the hundreds of dollars per month.
Ahh yes. Another "ads are bad" post. People always seem to forget that most of the Internet is free BECAUSE of ads.
I know. But I'd like to have an internet with donations, not ads.
You're not going to change human behavior so donations instead of ads means 99% of the content out there disappears.
This is a rather shallow article with barely any real points. Talking about all those externalities only serves to create noise rather than support any arguments against the ad model. You can just as easily argue that images and CSS should be removed to save even more bandwidth and processing power. Why even go online at all actually when you can get a newspaper for a few cents? Here's the reality - We only have 2 op…
I mean, would you say that dumping a type of toxic waste into a river is an "implementation" problem when there's no law against it?
> It's fast.
Except when ad-frameworks slow down browsing to a crawl because they heap innumerable delays on the page-load in order to "auction" the spot and maximize revenue.
> It's anonymous
Except for our big ad-networks that incorporated quita lot of fingerprinting, profiling, and even surveillance.
> It's secure
Except for how ad-networks are a vector for malware, since there's no incentive to vet content beyond maintaining their own throughput.