4 ms·

> But then the notion of earning an income on ads came along That's unfair, and almost flat out wrong. Content and ads pretty much evolved hand in hand. Sure,

> But then the notion of earning an income on ads came along That's unfair, and almost flat out wrong. Content and ads pretty much evolved hand in hand. Sure, there was some content up before ads came along, but ads came up almost immediately after. There was also practically no content on the 'net compared to today. The net back then was... almost non-existent. It was a ghost town. You had sites like prodigy and compuserve hosting a large chunk of the 'net and they did have ads. This was in the mid 90s.

TheOtherHobbes 11y ago
I've been online since 1994, and that's not how I remember it. There was plenty of amateur content put up for fun before the ad explosion. There were search engines for the content. And there was a lot of academic and technical information. Then the business types moved and tried to turn the entire web into a strip mall. To some extent they succeeded. Twitchy pointless banners invaded a lot of pages. To a large extent they failed, because the purveyors of twitchy little banners pretended they have the same user impact as print and TV advertising - and that idea has always been demonstrably wrong. The problem is that the twitchy little banners created an entire economy of user sharking, which completely fails to understand that the best ads give real value to users - either by providing truly useful leads, or by being beautiful and interesting. Networked web ads are none of the above. Occasionally you'll see sites that sell space to a narrow targeted niche relevant to readers of those pages. Those tend to do much better. But the scatter-shot nature of web advertising puts it on the same level as email spam. It's not useful, it's not interesting, it's not beautiful, it's just distracting and annoying. Most of it provides no user benefit at all. It deserves to die until that changes. If it can't exist without being parasitic on content, then the market needs to kill it off until it works out how to pays its way. And the content industry needs to get over itself and start producing outstanding, irreplaceable, content that readers genuinely want to pay for. If it can't do that, it needs to die out too.
- scholia 11y ago
  Ads have been funding content for centuries, and that includes newspapers, magazines, radio and TV. In most cases, people have never had to pay the full cost of producing the content they consume, which may well have resulted in them undervaluing content across the board. When commercial content providers (newspapers, magazines, radio and TV etc) moved on to the web, they naturally brought their ad-funded business model along with them.
  - ZenoArrow 11y ago
    > " In most cases, people have never had to pay the full cost of producing the content they consume" That's debatable. It's worth remembering that before the Internet, many traditional forms of media had multiple income streams, of which advertising was only one. Would it have been possible to produce TV and radio content based on a subscription-only model? Seemed to have worked out fine for the BBC. Newspapers and magazines would have taken a hit, but if revenue was based on sales alone then it's certainly possible some of those institutions could have survived on this. In other words, it's not a case of working with zero money it's a case of working with less money.
    - zepto 11y ago
      The BBC has police to enforce its subscriptions - a model not easily reproduced by private companies.
      - ZenoArrow 11y ago
        Nonsense. Sky offers TV subscriptions without 'police to enforce its subscriptions'.
        scholia 11y ago
        Sky encrypts its content, and its subscriptions are certainly enforced by the whole legal system. Try forging some Sky cards or even using a personal account in a public setting, such as a pub, and you may well find out....

TheOtherHobbes 11y ago

I've been online since 1994, and that's not how I remember it. There was plenty of amateur content put up for fun before the ad explosion. There were search engines for the content. And there was a lot of academic and technical information. Then the business types moved and tried to turn the entire web into a strip mall. To some extent they succeeded. Twitchy pointless banners invaded a lot of pages. To a large extent they failed, because the purveyors of twitchy little banners pretended they have the same user impact as print and TV advertising - and that idea has always been demonstrably wrong. The problem is that the twitchy little banners created an entire economy of user sharking, which completely fails to understand that the best ads give real value to users - either by providing truly useful leads, or by being beautiful and interesting. Networked web ads are none of the above. Occasionally you'll see sites that sell space to a narrow targeted niche relevant to readers of those pages. Those tend to do much better. But the scatter-shot nature of web advertising puts it on the same level as email spam. It's not useful, it's not interesting, it's not beautiful, it's just distracting and annoying. Most of it provides no user benefit at all. It deserves to die until that changes. If it can't exist without being parasitic on content, then the market needs to kill it off until it works out how to pays its way. And the content industry needs to get over itself and start producing outstanding, irreplaceable, content that readers genuinely want to pay for. If it can't do that, it needs to die out too.

scholia 11y ago
Ads have been funding content for centuries, and that includes newspapers, magazines, radio and TV. In most cases, people have never had to pay the full cost of producing the content they consume, which may well have resulted in them undervaluing content across the board. When commercial content providers (newspapers, magazines, radio and TV etc) moved on to the web, they naturally brought their ad-funded business model along with them.
- ZenoArrow 11y ago
  > " In most cases, people have never had to pay the full cost of producing the content they consume" That's debatable. It's worth remembering that before the Internet, many traditional forms of media had multiple income streams, of which advertising was only one. Would it have been possible to produce TV and radio content based on a subscription-only model? Seemed to have worked out fine for the BBC. Newspapers and magazines would have taken a hit, but if revenue was based on sales alone then it's certainly possible some of those institutions could have survived on this. In other words, it's not a case of working with zero money it's a case of working with less money.
  - zepto 11y ago
    The BBC has police to enforce its subscriptions - a model not easily reproduced by private companies.
    - ZenoArrow 11y ago
      Nonsense. Sky offers TV subscriptions without 'police to enforce its subscriptions'.
      - scholia 11y ago
        Sky encrypts its content, and its subscriptions are certainly enforced by the whole legal system. Try forging some Sky cards or even using a personal account in a public setting, such as a pub, and you may well find out....