8 ms·

Content is dead

75 points by vkb 11y ago

draw_down 11y ago
There are a number of tools built to extract the content from those kinds of pages, did the author try any or just start YOLOing Python scripts?
- dimgl 11y ago
  I don't think that's the point of the article though. The author is criticizing the rise of bloated webpages with very little good content.
  - tragic 11y ago
    Or not so much that, but the practice of putting terrible content up and funding it by selling someone else's soul to the advertising apparatus. And then demanding that you give up that soul, in order to fund "high quality content".
- amyjess 11y ago
  When you can count your lines of Python code on your fingers, it's probably faster to just write up a script than it is to search for existing software.
m52go 11y ago
I agree with the author concerning content and ads, but find it ironic that the article's title is so click-baity and misleading (considering she never implies content is actually dying, just that its business model is).
Swizec 11y ago
> today can’t epxect to put out mostly junk filler I wonder if that's a litmus test to see if people finish reading. Great article, perfect sentiment, last paragraph has the only typo in the entire thing. And I totally agree. There are shitloads of people on the internet making money from content. Hell, I make some sometimes. If you build a real audience, listen to them, then solve their problems. Then content isn't dead. If you're trying to be mass media that appeals to everybody and nobody at the same time. Then content is dead. I mean, shit, look at someone like GaryVee or Casey Neistat, or even Kim Kardashian. They all make shitloads of money from content. And if you're looking for examples closer to HN home. Look at Amy Hoy, Brennan Dunn, or even Ramit Sethi. They might not make tens of millions, but they def print millions of dollars with their content businesses.
- atom-morgan 11y ago
  I agree. I think all that's changed is our idea of what content is. The mediums have increased.
- return0 11y ago
  There is a typo in the first line as well.
  - vkb 11y ago
    Fixed, thanks.
kirykl 11y ago
Comparing the Economist to an iPhone to Android switch article is not a fair comparison. The Wired iPhone2Android article is and was never designed to be content. You shouldn't expect it to be either honestly. Apple has great content on the subject for free https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201196 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201196 The 3rd party link bloat however is spot on
- takno 11y ago
  And yet that was the article the author valued enough to bother fighting through the adwall for. Everything else on wired was really bad
Animats 11y ago
We'll know that ad supported content is dead when AOL, or "Aol.", or whatever, and Demand Media, go bust. They will not be missed. Micropayments are going nowhere. As I've pointed out before, the enthusiasm for micropayments comes from people who want to collect them. There's very little consumer demand for the ability to send somebody a dime. Subscriptions work only for very high quality content. The Economist, yes; Wired, no. Newspapers with big reporting staffs, yes; pundits, no. The trend we're seeing in advertising is that only Google and Facebook really matter to advertisers. The third-party ad industry is mostly bottom feeders, and it's getting worse. (See earlier article today about Forbes distributing malware.)
- jsonne 11y ago
  As an advertiser, yes absolutely Google and Facebook are king. No one else even comes close to touching their level of audience segmentation, results reporting, and knowing that their inventory is good from both a viewability/advertiser standpoint as well as a half decent customer experience standpoint.
- virmundi 11y ago
  Just a small point about micropayments. The current system is not micro. Micro is hundredths of a cent or less. At that price point it might be possible to use them. Sadly not even bitcoin (afaik) can handle such transactions. Transaction costs are too high under every system. Even IBM's research- a few years ago, bottomed out at 25 cents.
  - pcmaffey 11y ago
    Seems awkward (and pricey, as mentioned) to handle an actual transaction each time. Why not just have a browser extension that aggregates and bills monthly? Like the opposite of an ad-blocker, an ad-unlocker. This has probably been discussed somewhere...
    - leereeves 11y ago
      How would you do that without needing a way to deal with many of the same issues: to authorize every pageview, track account balances, deal with fraud, and correct errors? You definitely couldn't afford to interact with the financial system (ACH, credit cards, or even Bitcoin) for every pageview, but you'd have the same challenges to solve.
takno 11y ago
This +1000. The guardian, a paper I used to buy regularly, has transformed itself comprehensively into a hell of lazy ill informed clickbait, uncritically repeating unsupported conclusions from nonsense science and refusing to differentiate their serious analysis from crappy user generated content. Now I can't even bring myself to pay the 3 quid a month subscription even though the crossword alone would probably be worth that.
- dingdingdang 11y ago
  The Guardian has gone, in Claire Graves' Spiral Dynamics terms, gone FS centric: basically treating truth as context dependent and thus completely relative. This makes for unreadable & highly subjective and sarcastic reading without much point beyond the authors own self interest in writing (and presumably making a living from it..).
- intrasight 11y ago
  It is really sad about The Guardian. But truth be told, one only needs two or three news sources. They are no longer one of mine.
  - noam87 11y ago
    > one only needs two or three news sources. But society as a whole needs more. If the available pool of profitable resources for quality journalism keeps getting smaller, then a) the number of stories that fall through the cracks get larger, b) the surface area for corruption gets smaller: now all I need is to influence one editor/journalist to get story x pulled.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - intrasight 11y ago
      That is a valid and excellent point. Shame on me for taking a narrow perspective. But how can I as an individual support more than a few new publications?
golergka 11y ago
So, the author didn't even think to question her assumption that she is entitles to get the content for free, without paying dorectly or through being subjected to ads?
pier25 11y ago
We need a Netflix for content. You pay a (reasonable) monthly subscription and they pay each content provider depending on number of views.
- qq66 11y ago
  It would be incredibly bold for a major subscription content vendor, such as the NYTimes, to set up such a program. You sign into your NYTimes account, and sites around the web either become available to you, hide their advertising for you, or offer extra premium content just for NYTimes subscribers. Basically, the app store model built upon the NYTimes, where you get the basic news from the New York Times and the niche stuff from content partners who the NYTimes will reimburse for page views, out of the subscription fee they are already collecting. This would be so bold that I doubt it will happen from an existing print content vendor like NYTimes. Seems like something Amazon might do as a Prime benefit, though. Basically like Prime video, just for text.
  - pier25 11y ago
    > Basically like Prime video, just for text. Or Netflix...
- qrv3w 11y ago
  https://blendle.com/ https://blendle.com/ is attempting just this. They have a beta service available now, and its rather nice. You pay a few cents per article and you can easily get refunds if you don't like the article or if it isn't what you expected.
  - siquick 11y ago
    Thanks, looks interesting
  - ebola1717 11y ago
    I think the pay-per-article model is still worse than a single flat fee. Because there's a marginal cost per article, each time you have an article link you have to ask yourself "do i definitely want to read this?" Even if there are refunds and stuff, this has a psychological cost. It makes sharing content harder too. It also might be weird to say even more directly that "this article produced exactly X dollars of profit," or "this journalist's articles produce X dollars of profit on average." Also, one of the best things about the Internet & the ad model is that it made content available to everyone. Someone from a relatively poor background, or someone who's just strapped for cash at a certain time, will still have equal access to information.
kukx 11y ago
Let's be honest, why they shouldn't block adblock? The ads bring them money. And they need money to survive and, if they lucky, develop. The writers have families or plan to have ones, they need to be rewarded for their work. It may be their main or only source of income. Now, if they also provide a valuable information for you, I think that trying to trick them into giving it for free (ad free) is wrong. I think and it may controversial here, but every valuable site that lives on ads should block adblock. And don't get me wrong, I actually use adblock myself, but I'm more than happy to add exceptions for the sites I need or value.
- intrasight 11y ago
  Just remember that "adblock" doesn't block ads - it blocks ad networks. If publications ran their own ads (like they do in print) the ads would likely a)be of much higher quality, and b) not be blocked by "adblock"
  - seizethecheese 11y ago
    c) targeted more poorly (albeit without the privacy concerns.) d) expensive for the publisher (they have to do their own sales.) And therefore only feasible for very large sites.
    - jamie_ca 11y ago
      If the ads were targeted to the content on the page (remember when that was top-of-the-line tech?) rather than 3rd-party ads relevant to my assumed demographic, that'd solve for (c) nicely. I wonder if (d) could be a business idea - broker ads just like a regular ad network, but have the site itself host/deliver the ads. CPM is out due to needing to trust the site with accurate reporting, but you could definitely do CPC this way and have the click targets be centralized for the click tracking/redirect part.
      - intrasight 11y ago
        Thank you for getting my point. Clearly the traditional ad broker is going come back to have a role - built-in ad blockers will see to that. CPM is out no matter what.
zem 11y ago
the possibly naive pr{e,o}mise of the early web was that it would be a place for people who created content for the joy of creating it to share said content with people who would discover the delights of gatekeeper-free media consumption. "premium" content, that people were trying to make a living from selling, could go behind a paywall or into subscriber-only emails, the way books and magazines worked pre-web. sadly, the implicit contract was broken on both sides. people didn't want to pay for content, but they also wanted to consume (pirated) premium stuff, rather than commons material, so there was never a concerted push to have better discovery mechanisms atop the freely-provided web. likewise, producers wanted to impose user-hostile measures like drm and geographic segmentation on a medium that was not conducive to them, making piracy the more attractive option even if you didn't care about free-as-in-beer. professional producers had to go free because it was not a case of paid professional content competing with free amateur content; it was a case of paid professional content competing with free pirated professional content. that also sucked a lot of the oxygen out of the amateur ecosystem; who wants to dig through the virtual slushpile when you can get pre-curated professional material for free? i'm sad about the whole thing because i was really looking forward to seeing if the creative commons would compete on its own merits as a mass entertainment option. once the reward of putting something up is not people reading and appreciating it, but money from ad clicks, though, the producer's incentives are suddenly misaligned with the consumer's, and we end up with the web of today :(
- return0 11y ago
  Money is a really great way to reward for the content we need. The fact that this money has to be channeled through ads is the problem. Even if a miraculous solution to this problem is found, i wouldn't expect free content to be of high quality.
  - zem 11y ago
    i have read some very good creative commons novels and fanfiction, so for writing at least free has proven to be high quality. likewise for webcomics; i've seen strips that are every bit as entertaining as the professional strips that run in the newspapers. for other media, such as music, video and animation, one of the problems is that there is a barrier to creating casual content with decent production values. likewise, something like a play or a movie requires a longer-term and more coordinated effort than just someone sitting in their bedroom writing a story. but i believe that if the means of production were more accesssible, people would put in the effort for the sheer joy of creation. (doctorow's "pirate cinema" is a good read in that regard; the protagonist's art form was creating movies stitched together from clips of other movies. a true creative commons would make that a perfectly viable art form.) note that history has plenty of examples of really good writers and painters dying in poverty. they were moved to keep creating nonetheless; it's a very powerful human drive. the one bleak aspect to all of this is that the ability to produce art for free is biased towards people who already have another means of support, and one that leaves them both comfortably-well-off and with free time and energy. yet another way in which a basic income would enrich the world. edit: i also feel that money-as-a-reward has a deeper problem than the fact that it's currently shackled to ads. once you bring in money (and the implicit idea that the better and more popular your work is, the more money you'll make from it), your incentive is to impose access controls on it, because if there's a way to access something either by paying for it or for free, most people will go the free route. that adds an antagonistic note to the relationship between the producer and the consumer, as well as triggering a spiral of overreach with respect to "intellectual property rights".
wmccullough 11y ago
Content is not dead. Our current content delivery mechanisms have failed.
ebbv 11y ago
Wired has always been garbage. You're just getting old enough to realize it. There's always going to be garbage content sources that are more popular than the quality content sources. If you appreciate quality content, your duty is not to bitch about the garbage content but to support quality content.
danso 11y ago
I know these anti-ad posts are a dime a dozen here, but this is one of the more self-entitled pieces of dreck in the genre. She spends the first part of her essay slagging on WIRED ("Wired has dabbled in and eventually succumbed to the technology it once skewered and analyzed. Its latest efforts inevitably include pandering to the Instagram crowd."), implying that she's too good for their lowbrow content, and then the rest of it is about how dare they have the temerity to make her resort to using cURL to read their content. Or is this post supposed to be a sly retelling of the joke in Annie Hall? [1] What's so difficult about just opening an incognito window and suffering the couple of seconds it takes for a computer halfway across the world to deliver you content while you sit at your desk? The WIRED thing annoys me too but when they've got a good story, I'm willing to give them the adnetwork revenue. Forbes, on the other hand...that whole thing with their infected ad network, I've just stopped going to Forbes articles, period, even when they're posted here. It's been a long time since I can remember Forbes exclusively breaking a story...most of the time, it seems their articles are from their "contributor" network just blogspamming someone else's story. [1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075686/quotes?item=qt0373261 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075686/quotes?item=qt0373261
- vkb 11y ago
  > What's so difficult about just opening an incognito window and suffering the couple of seconds it takes for a computer halfway across the world to deliver you content while you sit at your desk? The whole point of the post was that I'm doing something inordinately ridiculous to access a little bit of good content. Scraping and incognito browsing are both anti-patterns that are symptoms of a sick media industry. A media that is sick cannot provide us with good news and content that we can use to further our critical thinking, and we should be worried and thinking about how we can possibly solve this problem instead of trying to bypass it.
  - danso 11y ago
    > Scraping and incognito browsing are both anti-patterns that are symptoms of a sick media industry. No, the cause (and, well, symptoms, too) is lack of revenue, something which was set in motion long before ad networks came into play and were the devil that many publishers felt they had to sign with. It's worth noting that in the early years, publications just threw up their content for free and went within the flow [1]. Within the industry today, it's (pointlessly) debated whether that was the right thing to do [2], as now everyone comes to expect the content to be free (nevermind the problem of other sites just copying-and-pasting entire articles). Either way, readers weren't offering to pay up back in the heyday when news outlets had plenty of money to do indepth journalism and offer it for free. Now news outlets have neither but they continue to offer their content for free. And apparently, those years of free, good content wasn't enough to convince consumers, years later, that it'd be nice to get financial support (via subscription). And so now the mechanism that many of them resort to to capture revenue -- third party ad networks -- is odious to people like you...and I sympathize...so you should do what you would be doing if those places threw up a hard paywall that requires a subscription: don't read their content. Instead, you go out of your way to take their content for free. Then you complain that the content is shit, and finally, you complain that publishers should be making it easier for you to take their shit. OK, sure, whatever. But at least recognize that there are business mechanisms more complicated than "stupid publishing company is using stupid ad network to get money" [1] http://www.niemanlab.org/2016/01/20-years-ago-today-nytimes-com-debuted-on-line-on-the-web/ http://www.niemanlab.org/2016/01/20-years-ago-today-nytimes-... [2] https://gigaom.com/2012/02/06/debunking-the-original-sin-of-online-newspapers/ https://gigaom.com/2012/02/06/debunking-the-original-sin-of-...
foltz 11y ago
A couple days ago I ran into Wired's ad-blocker blocker so I just clicked my Instapaper toolbar button. Worked like a charm. I wonder if or how often Wired makes an effort to block Instapaper.
- Nadya 11y ago
  This might come in handy for you then. An anti-anti-adblocker. https://github.com/reek/anti-adblock-killer https://github.com/reek/anti-adblock-killer
skybrian 11y ago
The trick is to open the link in incognito mode.
karatekidd32v 11y ago
Long live content.
Cozumel 11y ago
Why not just open firebug and delete the ad overlay? The author is either trying to 'show off' or is just genuinely oblivious that there's a much easier way. I'm not against ads per se, I have quite a few sites 'white listed' but when they beg for ads like Wired, then it's an automatic nope!
darpa_escapee 11y ago
I can't remember the last time I read an article and thought it was worth paying for. Even a fraction of a penny. That's the sad truth.
misterbwong 11y ago
I've said it before and I'll say it again. Adblock is going to cause ads to become MORE invasive, not less. Native ads, native content, and other "partnerships" are going to drive revenue-all of which are much worse that what we have now, privacy-wise. Adblock is only fueling an arms race between consumer and publisher. In the future, we might see a viable micropayment solution but there are some fundamental problems with this approach.
- nuttinwrong 11y ago
  I disagree. Sure, we'll see promoted content as norm, but those wise enough will shy away from those sources entirely.
klint 11y ago
(Disclosure: I write full-time for Wired, but I'll try to leave my feeling about our content aside here) Even if you pay for a subscription to The Economist, you're still going to see ads, both on their website and in their apps. Even though I'm a subscriber and logged in, Ublock Origin is showing over 100 blocked requests on an article I just pulled up there, some of them coming from the same third party ad networks everyone else uses. And my $1 a week subscription only buys me access to three articles a week. So while, as the OP points out, The Economist's Tom Standage [1] believes that ad revenue isn't a futureproof business model, they still appear to be heavily reliant on it. I don't know anything about the Economist's overhead, but the reason subscribers are still subjected to ads is very likely that subscription fees come nowhere near covering their costs. The truism in newspaper publishing is that subscriptions don't even cover the cost of printing and delivering the paper to a subscriber. Subscription-only business models have historically been tough. A lot of people ask "why can't all advertising be like The Deck," but the trouble there is that The Deck probably doesn't bring in enough revenue for publishers to operate a large newsroom [2] Personally (not speaking for my employers) I like Brave browser's idea, but they're already facing legal threats. And while they're promising publishers 70 percent of their ad revenue, but even if that's a larger percentage I don't know if that will work out to more than publishers get through the third party networks they use now. [1] http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/04/the-economists-tom-standage-on-digital-strategy-and-the-limits-of-a-model-based-on-advertising/ http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/04/the-economists-tom-standage... [2] https://www.quora.com/How-much-do-content-producers-who-are-apart-of-The-Deck-ad-network-make-monthly https://www.quora.com/How-much-do-content-producers-who-are-...
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- vkb 11y ago
  Thanks for reading. The Economist ads are a great point that I didn't address, and makes me even more worried for the high-quality news and content industry than I initially noted.
beeboop 11y ago
I look forward to the day when media outlets start dying due to lack of ad revenue. 99% of news content is rehashing of existing content done by someone else. Remove the noise and the few real contributors will be easily recognized and supported. Also helps lessen organizational bias when content creators are less beholden to the whims of their billionaire employers.

75 points by vkb 11y ago

There are a number of tools built to extract the content from those kinds of pages, did the author try any or just start YOLOing Python scripts?

dimgl 11y ago
I don't think that's the point of the article though. The author is criticizing the rise of bloated webpages with very little good content.
- tragic 11y ago
  Or not so much that, but the practice of putting terrible content up and funding it by selling someone else's soul to the advertising apparatus. And then demanding that you give up that soul, in order to fund "high quality content".
amyjess 11y ago
When you can count your lines of Python code on your fingers, it's probably faster to just write up a script than it is to search for existing software.

m52go 11y ago

I agree with the author concerning content and ads, but find it ironic that the article's title is so click-baity and misleading (considering she never implies content is actually dying, just that its business model is).

Swizec 11y ago

> today can’t epxect to put out mostly junk filler I wonder if that's a litmus test to see if people finish reading. Great article, perfect sentiment, last paragraph has the only typo in the entire thing. And I totally agree. There are shitloads of people on the internet making money from content. Hell, I make some sometimes. If you build a real audience, listen to them, then solve their problems. Then content isn't dead. If you're trying to be mass media that appeals to everybody and nobody at the same time. Then content is dead. I mean, shit, look at someone like GaryVee or Casey Neistat, or even Kim Kardashian. They all make shitloads of money from content. And if you're looking for examples closer to HN home. Look at Amy Hoy, Brennan Dunn, or even Ramit Sethi. They might not make tens of millions, but they def print millions of dollars with their content businesses.

atom-morgan 11y ago
I agree. I think all that's changed is our idea of what content is. The mediums have increased.
return0 11y ago
There is a typo in the first line as well.
- vkb 11y ago
  Fixed, thanks.

kirykl 11y ago

Comparing the Economist to an iPhone to Android switch article is not a fair comparison. The Wired iPhone2Android article is and was never designed to be content. You shouldn't expect it to be either honestly. Apple has great content on the subject for free https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201196 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201196 The 3rd party link bloat however is spot on

takno 11y ago
And yet that was the article the author valued enough to bother fighting through the adwall for. Everything else on wired was really bad

Animats 11y ago

We'll know that ad supported content is dead when AOL, or "Aol.", or whatever, and Demand Media, go bust. They will not be missed. Micropayments are going nowhere. As I've pointed out before, the enthusiasm for micropayments comes from people who want to collect them. There's very little consumer demand for the ability to send somebody a dime. Subscriptions work only for very high quality content. The Economist, yes; Wired, no. Newspapers with big reporting staffs, yes; pundits, no. The trend we're seeing in advertising is that only Google and Facebook really matter to advertisers. The third-party ad industry is mostly bottom feeders, and it's getting worse. (See earlier article today about Forbes distributing malware.)

jsonne 11y ago
As an advertiser, yes absolutely Google and Facebook are king. No one else even comes close to touching their level of audience segmentation, results reporting, and knowing that their inventory is good from both a viewability/advertiser standpoint as well as a half decent customer experience standpoint.
virmundi 11y ago
Just a small point about micropayments. The current system is not micro. Micro is hundredths of a cent or less. At that price point it might be possible to use them. Sadly not even bitcoin (afaik) can handle such transactions. Transaction costs are too high under every system. Even IBM's research- a few years ago, bottomed out at 25 cents.
- pcmaffey 11y ago
  Seems awkward (and pricey, as mentioned) to handle an actual transaction each time. Why not just have a browser extension that aggregates and bills monthly? Like the opposite of an ad-blocker, an ad-unlocker. This has probably been discussed somewhere...
  - leereeves 11y ago
    How would you do that without needing a way to deal with many of the same issues: to authorize every pageview, track account balances, deal with fraud, and correct errors? You definitely couldn't afford to interact with the financial system (ACH, credit cards, or even Bitcoin) for every pageview, but you'd have the same challenges to solve.

takno 11y ago

This +1000. The guardian, a paper I used to buy regularly, has transformed itself comprehensively into a hell of lazy ill informed clickbait, uncritically repeating unsupported conclusions from nonsense science and refusing to differentiate their serious analysis from crappy user generated content. Now I can't even bring myself to pay the 3 quid a month subscription even though the crossword alone would probably be worth that.

dingdingdang 11y ago
The Guardian has gone, in Claire Graves' Spiral Dynamics terms, gone FS centric: basically treating truth as context dependent and thus completely relative. This makes for unreadable & highly subjective and sarcastic reading without much point beyond the authors own self interest in writing (and presumably making a living from it..).
intrasight 11y ago
It is really sad about The Guardian. But truth be told, one only needs two or three news sources. They are no longer one of mine.
- noam87 11y ago
  > one only needs two or three news sources. But society as a whole needs more. If the available pool of profitable resources for quality journalism keeps getting smaller, then a) the number of stories that fall through the cracks get larger, b) the surface area for corruption gets smaller: now all I need is to influence one editor/journalist to get story x pulled.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - intrasight 11y ago
    That is a valid and excellent point. Shame on me for taking a narrow perspective. But how can I as an individual support more than a few new publications?

golergka 11y ago

So, the author didn't even think to question her assumption that she is entitles to get the content for free, without paying dorectly or through being subjected to ads?

pier25 11y ago

We need a Netflix for content. You pay a (reasonable) monthly subscription and they pay each content provider depending on number of views.

qq66 11y ago
It would be incredibly bold for a major subscription content vendor, such as the NYTimes, to set up such a program. You sign into your NYTimes account, and sites around the web either become available to you, hide their advertising for you, or offer extra premium content just for NYTimes subscribers. Basically, the app store model built upon the NYTimes, where you get the basic news from the New York Times and the niche stuff from content partners who the NYTimes will reimburse for page views, out of the subscription fee they are already collecting. This would be so bold that I doubt it will happen from an existing print content vendor like NYTimes. Seems like something Amazon might do as a Prime benefit, though. Basically like Prime video, just for text.
- pier25 11y ago
  > Basically like Prime video, just for text. Or Netflix...
qrv3w 11y ago
https://blendle.com/ https://blendle.com/ is attempting just this. They have a beta service available now, and its rather nice. You pay a few cents per article and you can easily get refunds if you don't like the article or if it isn't what you expected.
- siquick 11y ago
  Thanks, looks interesting
- ebola1717 11y ago
  I think the pay-per-article model is still worse than a single flat fee. Because there's a marginal cost per article, each time you have an article link you have to ask yourself "do i definitely want to read this?" Even if there are refunds and stuff, this has a psychological cost. It makes sharing content harder too. It also might be weird to say even more directly that "this article produced exactly X dollars of profit," or "this journalist's articles produce X dollars of profit on average." Also, one of the best things about the Internet & the ad model is that it made content available to everyone. Someone from a relatively poor background, or someone who's just strapped for cash at a certain time, will still have equal access to information.

kukx 11y ago

Let's be honest, why they shouldn't block adblock? The ads bring them money. And they need money to survive and, if they lucky, develop. The writers have families or plan to have ones, they need to be rewarded for their work. It may be their main or only source of income. Now, if they also provide a valuable information for you, I think that trying to trick them into giving it for free (ad free) is wrong. I think and it may controversial here, but every valuable site that lives on ads should block adblock. And don't get me wrong, I actually use adblock myself, but I'm more than happy to add exceptions for the sites I need or value.

intrasight 11y ago
Just remember that "adblock" doesn't block ads - it blocks ad networks. If publications ran their own ads (like they do in print) the ads would likely a)be of much higher quality, and b) not be blocked by "adblock"
- seizethecheese 11y ago
  c) targeted more poorly (albeit without the privacy concerns.) d) expensive for the publisher (they have to do their own sales.) And therefore only feasible for very large sites.
  - jamie_ca 11y ago
    If the ads were targeted to the content on the page (remember when that was top-of-the-line tech?) rather than 3rd-party ads relevant to my assumed demographic, that'd solve for (c) nicely. I wonder if (d) could be a business idea - broker ads just like a regular ad network, but have the site itself host/deliver the ads. CPM is out due to needing to trust the site with accurate reporting, but you could definitely do CPC this way and have the click targets be centralized for the click tracking/redirect part.
    - intrasight 11y ago
      Thank you for getting my point. Clearly the traditional ad broker is going come back to have a role - built-in ad blockers will see to that. CPM is out no matter what.

zem 11y ago

the possibly naive pr{e,o}mise of the early web was that it would be a place for people who created content for the joy of creating it to share said content with people who would discover the delights of gatekeeper-free media consumption. "premium" content, that people were trying to make a living from selling, could go behind a paywall or into subscriber-only emails, the way books and magazines worked pre-web. sadly, the implicit contract was broken on both sides. people didn't want to pay for content, but they also wanted to consume (pirated) premium stuff, rather than commons material, so there was never a concerted push to have better discovery mechanisms atop the freely-provided web. likewise, producers wanted to impose user-hostile measures like drm and geographic segmentation on a medium that was not conducive to them, making piracy the more attractive option even if you didn't care about free-as-in-beer. professional producers had to go free because it was not a case of paid professional content competing with free amateur content; it was a case of paid professional content competing with free pirated professional content. that also sucked a lot of the oxygen out of the amateur ecosystem; who wants to dig through the virtual slushpile when you can get pre-curated professional material for free? i'm sad about the whole thing because i was really looking forward to seeing if the creative commons would compete on its own merits as a mass entertainment option. once the reward of putting something up is not people reading and appreciating it, but money from ad clicks, though, the producer's incentives are suddenly misaligned with the consumer's, and we end up with the web of today :(

return0 11y ago
Money is a really great way to reward for the content we need. The fact that this money has to be channeled through ads is the problem. Even if a miraculous solution to this problem is found, i wouldn't expect free content to be of high quality.
- zem 11y ago
  i have read some very good creative commons novels and fanfiction, so for writing at least free has proven to be high quality. likewise for webcomics; i've seen strips that are every bit as entertaining as the professional strips that run in the newspapers. for other media, such as music, video and animation, one of the problems is that there is a barrier to creating casual content with decent production values. likewise, something like a play or a movie requires a longer-term and more coordinated effort than just someone sitting in their bedroom writing a story. but i believe that if the means of production were more accesssible, people would put in the effort for the sheer joy of creation. (doctorow's "pirate cinema" is a good read in that regard; the protagonist's art form was creating movies stitched together from clips of other movies. a true creative commons would make that a perfectly viable art form.) note that history has plenty of examples of really good writers and painters dying in poverty. they were moved to keep creating nonetheless; it's a very powerful human drive. the one bleak aspect to all of this is that the ability to produce art for free is biased towards people who already have another means of support, and one that leaves them both comfortably-well-off and with free time and energy. yet another way in which a basic income would enrich the world. edit: i also feel that money-as-a-reward has a deeper problem than the fact that it's currently shackled to ads. once you bring in money (and the implicit idea that the better and more popular your work is, the more money you'll make from it), your incentive is to impose access controls on it, because if there's a way to access something either by paying for it or for free, most people will go the free route. that adds an antagonistic note to the relationship between the producer and the consumer, as well as triggering a spiral of overreach with respect to "intellectual property rights".

wmccullough 11y ago

Content is not dead. Our current content delivery mechanisms have failed.

ebbv 11y ago

Wired has always been garbage. You're just getting old enough to realize it. There's always going to be garbage content sources that are more popular than the quality content sources. If you appreciate quality content, your duty is not to bitch about the garbage content but to support quality content.

danso 11y ago

I know these anti-ad posts are a dime a dozen here, but this is one of the more self-entitled pieces of dreck in the genre. She spends the first part of her essay slagging on WIRED ("Wired has dabbled in and eventually succumbed to the technology it once skewered and analyzed. Its latest efforts inevitably include pandering to the Instagram crowd."), implying that she's too good for their lowbrow content, and then the rest of it is about how dare they have the temerity to make her resort to using cURL to read their content. Or is this post supposed to be a sly retelling of the joke in Annie Hall? [1] What's so difficult about just opening an incognito window and suffering the couple of seconds it takes for a computer halfway across the world to deliver you content while you sit at your desk? The WIRED thing annoys me too but when they've got a good story, I'm willing to give them the adnetwork revenue. Forbes, on the other hand...that whole thing with their infected ad network, I've just stopped going to Forbes articles, period, even when they're posted here. It's been a long time since I can remember Forbes exclusively breaking a story...most of the time, it seems their articles are from their "contributor" network just blogspamming someone else's story. [1] http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075686/quotes?item=qt0373261 http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0075686/quotes?item=qt0373261

vkb 11y ago
> What's so difficult about just opening an incognito window and suffering the couple of seconds it takes for a computer halfway across the world to deliver you content while you sit at your desk? The whole point of the post was that I'm doing something inordinately ridiculous to access a little bit of good content. Scraping and incognito browsing are both anti-patterns that are symptoms of a sick media industry. A media that is sick cannot provide us with good news and content that we can use to further our critical thinking, and we should be worried and thinking about how we can possibly solve this problem instead of trying to bypass it.
- danso 11y ago
  > Scraping and incognito browsing are both anti-patterns that are symptoms of a sick media industry. No, the cause (and, well, symptoms, too) is lack of revenue, something which was set in motion long before ad networks came into play and were the devil that many publishers felt they had to sign with. It's worth noting that in the early years, publications just threw up their content for free and went within the flow [1]. Within the industry today, it's (pointlessly) debated whether that was the right thing to do [2], as now everyone comes to expect the content to be free (nevermind the problem of other sites just copying-and-pasting entire articles). Either way, readers weren't offering to pay up back in the heyday when news outlets had plenty of money to do indepth journalism and offer it for free. Now news outlets have neither but they continue to offer their content for free. And apparently, those years of free, good content wasn't enough to convince consumers, years later, that it'd be nice to get financial support (via subscription). And so now the mechanism that many of them resort to to capture revenue -- third party ad networks -- is odious to people like you...and I sympathize...so you should do what you would be doing if those places threw up a hard paywall that requires a subscription: don't read their content. Instead, you go out of your way to take their content for free. Then you complain that the content is shit, and finally, you complain that publishers should be making it easier for you to take their shit. OK, sure, whatever. But at least recognize that there are business mechanisms more complicated than "stupid publishing company is using stupid ad network to get money" [1] http://www.niemanlab.org/2016/01/20-years-ago-today-nytimes-com-debuted-on-line-on-the-web/ http://www.niemanlab.org/2016/01/20-years-ago-today-nytimes-... [2] https://gigaom.com/2012/02/06/debunking-the-original-sin-of-online-newspapers/ https://gigaom.com/2012/02/06/debunking-the-original-sin-of-...

foltz 11y ago

A couple days ago I ran into Wired's ad-blocker blocker so I just clicked my Instapaper toolbar button. Worked like a charm. I wonder if or how often Wired makes an effort to block Instapaper.

Nadya 11y ago
This might come in handy for you then. An anti-anti-adblocker. https://github.com/reek/anti-adblock-killer https://github.com/reek/anti-adblock-killer

skybrian 11y ago

The trick is to open the link in incognito mode.

karatekidd32v 11y ago

Long live content.

Cozumel 11y ago

Why not just open firebug and delete the ad overlay? The author is either trying to 'show off' or is just genuinely oblivious that there's a much easier way. I'm not against ads per se, I have quite a few sites 'white listed' but when they beg for ads like Wired, then it's an automatic nope!

darpa_escapee 11y ago

I can't remember the last time I read an article and thought it was worth paying for. Even a fraction of a penny. That's the sad truth.

misterbwong 11y ago

I've said it before and I'll say it again. Adblock is going to cause ads to become MORE invasive, not less. Native ads, native content, and other "partnerships" are going to drive revenue-all of which are much worse that what we have now, privacy-wise. Adblock is only fueling an arms race between consumer and publisher. In the future, we might see a viable micropayment solution but there are some fundamental problems with this approach.

nuttinwrong 11y ago
I disagree. Sure, we'll see promoted content as norm, but those wise enough will shy away from those sources entirely.

klint 11y ago

(Disclosure: I write full-time for Wired, but I'll try to leave my feeling about our content aside here) Even if you pay for a subscription to The Economist, you're still going to see ads, both on their website and in their apps. Even though I'm a subscriber and logged in, Ublock Origin is showing over 100 blocked requests on an article I just pulled up there, some of them coming from the same third party ad networks everyone else uses. And my $1 a week subscription only buys me access to three articles a week. So while, as the OP points out, The Economist's Tom Standage [1] believes that ad revenue isn't a futureproof business model, they still appear to be heavily reliant on it. I don't know anything about the Economist's overhead, but the reason subscribers are still subjected to ads is very likely that subscription fees come nowhere near covering their costs. The truism in newspaper publishing is that subscriptions don't even cover the cost of printing and delivering the paper to a subscriber. Subscription-only business models have historically been tough. A lot of people ask "why can't all advertising be like The Deck," but the trouble there is that The Deck probably doesn't bring in enough revenue for publishers to operate a large newsroom [2] Personally (not speaking for my employers) I like Brave browser's idea, but they're already facing legal threats. And while they're promising publishers 70 percent of their ad revenue, but even if that's a larger percentage I don't know if that will work out to more than publishers get through the third party networks they use now. [1] http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/04/the-economists-tom-standage-on-digital-strategy-and-the-limits-of-a-model-based-on-advertising/ http://www.niemanlab.org/2015/04/the-economists-tom-standage... [2] https://www.quora.com/How-much-do-content-producers-who-are-apart-of-The-Deck-ad-network-make-monthly https://www.quora.com/How-much-do-content-producers-who-are-...

deleted 11y ago
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vkb 11y ago
Thanks for reading. The Economist ads are a great point that I didn't address, and makes me even more worried for the high-quality news and content industry than I initially noted.

beeboop 11y ago

I look forward to the day when media outlets start dying due to lack of ad revenue. 99% of news content is rehashing of existing content done by someone else. Remove the noise and the few real contributors will be easily recognized and supported. Also helps lessen organizational bias when content creators are less beholden to the whims of their billionaire employers.