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See, I really like markets, and I have a problem with phrases like: > I like reading techcrunch, but would never pay for it. Sounds to me a lot like Mitt Romn

See, I really like markets, and I have a problem with phrases like: > I like reading techcrunch, but would never pay for it. Sounds to me a lot like Mitt Romney talking about how his wife has the most important job in the world, but she's essentially his unpaid housewife. Sounds hollow. You are paying for techcrunch, by buying products advertised on it. It would be good for the finances of everyone in society to know exactly how much. If the product company could slice prices in half because their arms-race marketing budget is soaring, maybe you'd change your mind and pay techcrunch directly, so that you, techcrunch, and the R&D department of the product benefit, while marketing stops soaking up a large chunk of the money exchanged.

loco5niner 11y ago
> Sounds to me a lot like Mitt Romney talking about how his wife has the most important job in the world, but she's essentially his unpaid housewife. Sounds hollow. No, he's actually saying that raising the next generation is the most important job in the world. aka, Mom. And I think he's right.
- acdha 11y ago
  Most of us live in market economies. Jobs which are truly considered to be important have respect and pay well. In contrast, in the U.S. we don't even respect mothers enough to e.g. give them enough time to fully recover from giving birth before going back to work or ensure that nobody has to worry about losing their job or income if they take a sick kid to the doctor.
  - mercer 11y ago
    Man, I don't want to derail this conversation, but I have so many feelings about this issue. And they often conflict. As someone raised in a very traditional religious environment, I am not a big fan of the market economy approach of quantifying and anonymizing roles (including that of my local grocer or 'fishmonger', to name an example). But on the other hand, we live where we live, and in this world I figure if we don't respect mothers because their role is difficult to express in money, we should at the very least fix that and give them all the support they need, monetary, paid leave, or otherwise.
  - loco5niner 11y ago
    > Jobs which are truly considered to be important have respect and pay well Correction: Jobs that return a very positive cash flow (for someone) pay well. (Teachers, Cops, Firefighters vs Brokers, Singers, Pro Athletes)
    - acdha 11y ago
      I'm not sure those examples mean what you say – e.g. teachers are allegedly important but get paid far less than your other two examples, have increasingly regimented working conditions and are popularly blamed for circumstances outside of their control. In contrast, it's far less common for anyone to e.g. go after first responders’ pay or benefits or talk about how public safety depends on breaking their union. Unsurprisingly, that respect gradient also tracks closely which jobs are stereotypically female-dominated. Even staying in education, school administrators - historically male – get more respect for comparable levels of education and are paid more for doing less work. Again, the point is simply that our talk isn't backed up by our actions.
- RodericDay 11y ago
  He's paying lip service to that idea. As acdha points out, he's not "putting his money where his mouth is".
  - loco5niner 11y ago
    Sure he his. She's a stay-at-home mom. Whose paycheck bought the house, etc? His.
- Merovius 11y ago
  I think what they meant was "This job is important. So we should pay it accordingly. It is kind of hollow claiming that a job is important, but at the same time not paying it".
  - loco5niner 11y ago
    Yep, I get that's what was meant. It's just not logically sound.
fwn 11y ago
No, paying for a website and being the reason some website is enabled to make money aren't the same things. This is because the most important part in the whole process of wealth creation is it's incentive structure. Reducing it to the end state money distribution is like ripping a dimension off the market.
paulmd 11y ago
Costs don't drive prices though. Products are priced at whatever the consumer will pay, and if they won't pay enough then the product doesn't get made. Price competition is an idea that exists but it's plan Z for any business. It's the last resort when you can't produce a superior product or find another niche that justifies higher margins. Think AMD vs Intel here. No sane businessman has ever woken up and decided to slash his profit margin just for the hell of it. You can tell by the fact that businesses make profits - that wouldn't happen with perfect competition. Nobody wants to be the low-margin high-volume product, because you're only a bad quarter away from low-margin low-volume. And once you're in it, it's a really hard pit to climb out of.
Avshalom 11y ago
>See, I really like markets, and I have a problem with phrases like: >> I like reading techcrunch, but would never pay for it. Like most people in the world I can't trade time for money beyond a certain threshold AND I can't usually use that money and earn it simultaneously. While my attention is also limited it's something I can split so many people can pay for a small portion of my attention while I am simultaneously using whatever those fractions of attention are paying for. Thats why "What I'll Spend Money On" is not the same as "What I Like" (in this case, there are of course various other situations in which they are different for other reasons)
ryandvm 11y ago
The problem is that nobody is asking the actual market value of their product. TechCrunch would probably want subscribers to pay north of $5/month. But the actual marketing value (in ad revenue) that they are currently able to extract from a single reader is probably closer to $0.50/year - if that. You solve the micropayment problem and then we can talk about what I'm willing to pay for content.
- eevilspock 11y ago
  Mozilla Research put the entire web's advertising revenue at $12.70/month per user[1]. In other words, if they are right we are living with the consequences of advertising for a mere $13/month, $13 dollar they still get from us anyway because it's baked into the prices of the advertised products. > You solve the micropayment problem We hackers and technologists here at HN are the "You". "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks." – Jeff Hammerbacher, fmr. Manager of Facebook Data Team, founder of Cloudera As I put it here a couple of weeks ago[2]: 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? Because that is what the advertising business model is: a get rich quick scheme. Undercut the straight up competitors that charge for their product by fooling consumers into thinking you're offering what the other guy is offering, but for free. Come on, who could turn down that? The saddest thing about Hacker News is that we all get behind radical things like FOSS (Bill Gates called it un-American) and Snowden, and fight SOPA and NSA violations of privacy, but because too many of our salaries depend on advertising revenue, our cognitive dissonance blinders go up lightning fast. - [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8586294 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8586294 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9961761 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9961761
  - maxerickson 11y ago
    Why assume there would be less overhead without the ads? With ads, there is also probably less friction visiting unknown sites; clicking to a site with too many ads and then just closing it is probably a better experience than knowing you blew $0.05 on crap content (I'm not saying getting frustrated about $0.05 makes sense, I'm saying it will probably happen).
chrismcb 11y ago
Product companies NEED advertising. Sure they could slice their prices (not in half) and not advertise. But then they would only grow by word of mouth. For some that is enough, but for most companies, it isn't enough.

loco5niner 11y ago

> Sounds to me a lot like Mitt Romney talking about how his wife has the most important job in the world, but she's essentially his unpaid housewife. Sounds hollow. No, he's actually saying that raising the next generation is the most important job in the world. aka, Mom. And I think he's right.

acdha 11y ago
Most of us live in market economies. Jobs which are truly considered to be important have respect and pay well. In contrast, in the U.S. we don't even respect mothers enough to e.g. give them enough time to fully recover from giving birth before going back to work or ensure that nobody has to worry about losing their job or income if they take a sick kid to the doctor.
- mercer 11y ago
  Man, I don't want to derail this conversation, but I have so many feelings about this issue. And they often conflict. As someone raised in a very traditional religious environment, I am not a big fan of the market economy approach of quantifying and anonymizing roles (including that of my local grocer or 'fishmonger', to name an example). But on the other hand, we live where we live, and in this world I figure if we don't respect mothers because their role is difficult to express in money, we should at the very least fix that and give them all the support they need, monetary, paid leave, or otherwise.
- loco5niner 11y ago
  > Jobs which are truly considered to be important have respect and pay well Correction: Jobs that return a very positive cash flow (for someone) pay well. (Teachers, Cops, Firefighters vs Brokers, Singers, Pro Athletes)
  - acdha 11y ago
    I'm not sure those examples mean what you say – e.g. teachers are allegedly important but get paid far less than your other two examples, have increasingly regimented working conditions and are popularly blamed for circumstances outside of their control. In contrast, it's far less common for anyone to e.g. go after first responders’ pay or benefits or talk about how public safety depends on breaking their union. Unsurprisingly, that respect gradient also tracks closely which jobs are stereotypically female-dominated. Even staying in education, school administrators - historically male – get more respect for comparable levels of education and are paid more for doing less work. Again, the point is simply that our talk isn't backed up by our actions.
RodericDay 11y ago
He's paying lip service to that idea. As acdha points out, he's not "putting his money where his mouth is".
- loco5niner 11y ago
  Sure he his. She's a stay-at-home mom. Whose paycheck bought the house, etc? His.
Merovius 11y ago
I think what they meant was "This job is important. So we should pay it accordingly. It is kind of hollow claiming that a job is important, but at the same time not paying it".
- loco5niner 11y ago
  Yep, I get that's what was meant. It's just not logically sound.

fwn 11y ago

No, paying for a website and being the reason some website is enabled to make money aren't the same things. This is because the most important part in the whole process of wealth creation is it's incentive structure. Reducing it to the end state money distribution is like ripping a dimension off the market.

paulmd 11y ago

Costs don't drive prices though. Products are priced at whatever the consumer will pay, and if they won't pay enough then the product doesn't get made. Price competition is an idea that exists but it's plan Z for any business. It's the last resort when you can't produce a superior product or find another niche that justifies higher margins. Think AMD vs Intel here. No sane businessman has ever woken up and decided to slash his profit margin just for the hell of it. You can tell by the fact that businesses make profits - that wouldn't happen with perfect competition. Nobody wants to be the low-margin high-volume product, because you're only a bad quarter away from low-margin low-volume. And once you're in it, it's a really hard pit to climb out of.

Avshalom 11y ago

>See, I really like markets, and I have a problem with phrases like: >> I like reading techcrunch, but would never pay for it. Like most people in the world I can't trade time for money beyond a certain threshold AND I can't usually use that money and earn it simultaneously. While my attention is also limited it's something I can split so many people can pay for a small portion of my attention while I am simultaneously using whatever those fractions of attention are paying for. Thats why "What I'll Spend Money On" is not the same as "What I Like" (in this case, there are of course various other situations in which they are different for other reasons)

ryandvm 11y ago

The problem is that nobody is asking the actual market value of their product. TechCrunch would probably want subscribers to pay north of $5/month. But the actual marketing value (in ad revenue) that they are currently able to extract from a single reader is probably closer to $0.50/year - if that. You solve the micropayment problem and then we can talk about what I'm willing to pay for content.

eevilspock 11y ago
Mozilla Research put the entire web's advertising revenue at $12.70/month per user[1]. In other words, if they are right we are living with the consequences of advertising for a mere $13/month, $13 dollar they still get from us anyway because it's baked into the prices of the advertised products. > You solve the micropayment problem We hackers and technologists here at HN are the "You". "The best minds of my generation are thinking about how to make people click ads. That sucks." – Jeff Hammerbacher, fmr. Manager of Facebook Data Team, founder of Cloudera As I put it here a couple of weeks ago[2]: 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? Because that is what the advertising business model is: a get rich quick scheme. Undercut the straight up competitors that charge for their product by fooling consumers into thinking you're offering what the other guy is offering, but for free. Come on, who could turn down that? The saddest thing about Hacker News is that we all get behind radical things like FOSS (Bill Gates called it un-American) and Snowden, and fight SOPA and NSA violations of privacy, but because too many of our salaries depend on advertising revenue, our cognitive dissonance blinders go up lightning fast. - [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8586294 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8586294 [2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9961761 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9961761
- maxerickson 11y ago
  Why assume there would be less overhead without the ads? With ads, there is also probably less friction visiting unknown sites; clicking to a site with too many ads and then just closing it is probably a better experience than knowing you blew $0.05 on crap content (I'm not saying getting frustrated about $0.05 makes sense, I'm saying it will probably happen).

chrismcb 11y ago

Product companies NEED advertising. Sure they could slice their prices (not in half) and not advertise. But then they would only grow by word of mouth. For some that is enough, but for most companies, it isn't enough.