251–259 of 259 posts
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OK, so let's be constructive. What reasonable, practical alternative do you suggest for someone who is just running a small site and wants to cover their hosting costs?
Look really hard for an ad network that either uses only jpg/png or puts at least half an effort into security, I guess.
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You can use a theorem prover like Coq to generate software that proves an image parser correct.
For an image parser all you really need is to use a language without buffer overflows.
Of course now you're not only prohibiting third party resources except images, you're even prohibiting modern image formats like SVG, which is a little ironic since SVG-based ads might be smaller and/or look cleaner than equivalent bitmaps.
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There are other ways to make money besides ads.
Yes, paywalls / subscriptions. Which this thread is notably dedicated to bitching about. Other than that, not really. As demonstrated both by personal experience (I've worked for a large pub; many acquaintances work for large-ish pubs) and the utter lack of success of the majority of publishers attempting this.
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Yes, paywalls / subscriptions. Which this thread is notably dedicated to bitching about. Other than that, not really. As demonstrated both by personal experience (I've worked for a large pub; many acquaintances work for large-ish pubs) and the utter lack of success of the majority of publishers attempting this.
Netflix? Amazon? HBO? Spotify?
Seems genius to me.
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Netflix? Amazon? HBO? Spotify?
subscription, subscription, subscription, subscription + ads
I have no qualms about paying subscriptions, and you won't find a post in which I'm "bitching about" subscriptions.
Instead of trying to create an alternate reality in which I'm somehow demanding things for free, how about you respond to my actual arguments?
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> And now you're saying that not only should the site operators make their content freely available and accept that some visitors will circumvent possibly the only way they have of generating revenue, those operators should also be actively responsible for vetting any third party content they incorporate within their site in case the third party is hostile No, I'm not saying that. I'm saying it's unethical to have ad…
The way you propose, by vetting ads, has been used successfully For businesses running large enough sites to operate their own scheme, sure. Facebook ads are pretty safe, for example. Unfortunately, this isn't a realistic option for smaller sites, and neither are any of the other things you mentioned in most cases. Alternatives like donations or PWYW have been tried and they almost always fail. That's why ad-funded w…
1. Most businesses fail, period. I think you would be hard-pressed to prove they failed because they doesn't have ads.
2. You conveniently ignored half the alternatives to ads that I listed, probably because there are numerous examples of successful subscription-based content providers.
> In a world complying with your rules, most of the modern web doesn't exist, because no-one would "ethically" be allowed to contribute to it without falling short of your standards.
This is true, but I'm not sure why you see this as a bad thing. Most of the modern web is noise that makes it harder to find signals I care about. Sites that get their money from me are more likely to give me content I want than sites that get their money from ads and malware.
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The way you propose, by vetting ads, has been used successfully For businesses running large enough sites to operate their own scheme, sure. Facebook ads are pretty safe, for example. Unfortunately, this isn't a realistic option for smaller sites, and neither are any of the other things you mentioned in most cases. Alternatives like donations or PWYW have been tried and they almost always fail. That's why ad-funded w…
> Alternatives like donations or PWYW have been tried and they almost always fail. 1. Most businesses fail, period. I think you would be hard-pressed to prove they failed because they doesn't have ads. 2. You conveniently ignored half the alternatives to ads that I listed, probably because there are numerous examples of successful subscription-based content providers. > In a world complying with your rules, most of t…
Well, if a business used to make enough revenue to turn a profit through ads, and then you take that revenue away and it fails, it seems likely that the failure was caused by the loss of ads combined with the lack of any alternative revenue stream(s) to replace them. Occam's razor and all that.
2. You conveniently ignored half the alternatives to ads that I listed, probably because there are numerous examples of successful subscription-based content providers.
From direct personal experience, getting a site to the point where someone is willing to pay real money for access -- even if you have lots of original content that gets very favourable comments and a lot of interest -- is hard.
If you're running a huge brand whose site people really do visit often -- a good quality news site, say, or perhaps a service like Netflix or Spotify -- then sure, someone might consider it worth paying a few dollars a month to subscribe.
If you're running a smaller niche site that someone might find very useful but only visit occasionally, unfortunately it is a different game entirely.
Just to be absolutely clear, so you don't think I'm ignoring any of your alternatives:
Donations: Known to generate negligible revenue in most cases.
Freemium: Possible in some cases, but only if there is something useful to upsell to.
PWYW: See Donations.
Subscriptions: Possible in some cases, but only if the site is big enough and/or updated often enough to attract regular visitors.
Grant: From where, exactly?
Sites that get their money from me are more likely to give me content I want than sites that get their money from ads and malware.
Really? I find sites that show up for the search terms I'm using and hold my attention for more than 5 seconds when I click through are often very useful.
However, I'm not going to subscribe to every one of the 150+ sites that my browser history tells me I visited today while researching something, or even the 10-20 of them that actually did have very useful information.
Nor am I realistically going to go through the hassle of making a card payment or using some donation service I've never heard of and don't necessarily trust just to give each site some fraction of a dollar, even if I considered the material they'd given me on that occasion to be worth it.
I would happily donate to such sites if an immediate and non-intrusive method for handling the micropayments existed, but sadly we haven't solved that problem yet. Until we do, I don't begrudge sites that are ad-funded, nor do I think they owe me anything if they block me because I then block those ads.
So as I wrote before, I don't think this discussion is going anywhere useful. You still haven't suggested any viable alternatives for many sites that are currently ad-funded, and you still seem to think all the responsibility for safety on the Internet belongs to the only people actually contributing anything in your scenario, i.e., the people running the sites.
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When the IP for a shared hosting server is flagged, the result in search for all sites residing under that IP are saddled with an alt URL titled "This site may be hacked". Their solution to fix it for the dozens/hundreds of benign sites co-hosted on said server? Sign up for more Google services(Google Search Console). In that way, they are behving like a typical corporation.
Sadly for your argument, what Google does there is the correct solution, because it is true .