10 ms·

Advertising cannot maintain the Internet

134 points by ultrasociality 10y ago

tomrod 10y ago
I've believed this for many years. Intrusive advertising is a cost to content consumers, one that they can circumvent by passively or actively ignoring.
gcb0 10y ago
author is clueless about online everything. just like I'm now commenting that he's wrong, if this gets enough votes, should he sends the proceeds of the article to me? internet content now is forums, user generated videos, etc. useless entertainment journalism is dead not because advertisement can't pay the bill. because it's dead.
zer00eyz 10y ago
>Then why have all attempts at commercializing micro-payments failed? I assert that MP constitutes an inherently different market realm, with unique problems and incentives that demand innovative solutions, empowering payment-for-content by individuals surfing the web. There is a pretty simple reason for this: All the embedded players (credit card processors, and banks) don't have the desire to deal with the extremely high volume and low (near zero) margin business this would create for them. Institutions who produce content aren't high on MOST users list of places to give money to when there are plenty of ways to get said product for FREE... You want me to give you $5 today so I can spend $0.03 of it on some article. Maybe I forget about it (good for you) or you loose it (bad for me) and then I have to fight to get it fixed (making this a money loosing proposition on both sides). The greed and avarice, of content producers and advertisers, destroyed what could have been a workable solution (ads), I have no faith that any micropayment platform or what ever else you can cook up is going to work unless it puts USERS FIRST.
- maroonblazer 10y ago
  >The greed and avarice, of content producers and advertisers, destroyed what could have been a workable solution (ads)... I understand how content producers can be blamed for the state of internet advertising but I don't understand why the advertisers are also implicated. It's the content producers who manufacture and sell the advertising product. If an advertiser doesn't buy the product his competitor will.
  - zer00eyz 10y ago
    Totally valid question: How does malware get into ad's, the publishers didn't put it there: http://www.extremetech.com/internet/220696-forbes-forces-readers-to-turn-off-ad-blockers-promptly-serves-malware http://www.extremetech.com/internet/220696-forbes-forces-rea... Meanwhile the industry itself calls ad blocking "immoral": http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/iab-chief-blasts-adblock-plus-immoral-mendacious-coven-techie-wannabes-169194 http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/iab-chief-blasts-adblo... There is this gem linked from the article where some of them admit it might be their fault: http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/iab-pivots-ad-blocking-and-issues-mea-culpa-we-messed-167583 http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/iab-pivots-ad-blocking...
- ghaff 10y ago
  I don't buy the suggestion that micropayments would work if only there were an easy (for users) and cost-effective way of making and processing them. Yes, there are some chicken and egg issues associated with a payment system that achieves critical mass and that doesn't fragment into a bunch of incompatible providers. But, really, that's mostly just technology and market development. Given the need/demand, I doubt it's even very hard. The bigger issue is probably the one that Clay Shirky offered years ago. Mental transaction costs. If I have to decide up-front whether an article is worth reading for a nickel (or whatever), I'm generally going to pass. At best, I'm going to have to think about clicking and that injects a lot of friction into the process.
boznz 10y ago
I pay my ISP $70/month for a home internet connection. I pay my mobile provider $40/month for 2GB Data I pay $100/Yr to a hosting service for my ad-free web site and email for my business which will always be there while my business is running (as will the ad-free web sites of most other businesses I know of). In addition to the above I pay various donations and subscriptions to certain sites I like and buy almost exclusively on line. It seems to me there is plenty of money to keep the internet going without advertising. To the multitude of news/media/blogs/click-bait sites duplicating the same content and that rely on advertising for their business model then good luck to you all, unobtrusive advertising was and still is ok with me, but because of the bad-apples it is now in your face and I ad-block everything.
- alwaysdownvoted 10y ago
  I'll bet a lot of folks would keep paying those prices even if all they did was use email. I'll bet further that is still the main reason many people have a home internet connection. That and internet banking, etc. Things subsidized by ads like YouTube and myriad other distractions are a bonus. If they were to disappear no one would be dropping their internet connection. Trust me, with bandwdth as it is, free video is not going to disappear. All things considered I think non-commercial websites like Wikipedia or Internet Archive are actually the most valuable ones. And even without ads they will not disappear because passionate dedicated people create them for non-commercial reasons. And the cost for the individual to store data and publish online keeps decreasing. The internet has heaps of inherent value that has nothing to do with advertising. Especially with today's computing power and bandwidth. It's like long distance calling anywhere in the world for a set monthly fee. And anyone can write software to send and receive over the network. Sign me up. For life. Anyone who used the internet in the late 80's early 90's before commercial activity was permitted, when bandwidth was limited and expensive, knows this. By all means argue for ads if it's your cash cow - try you best to save your golden goose, but spare us the absurd arguments that ads are what give the internet value.
  - ktRolster 10y ago
    but spare us the absurd arguments that ads are what give the internet value. Indeed. Some would argue they reduce the value of the internet.
Ileca 10y ago
I am always comforting myself by thinking that idiots who want to tweak my brain were throwing a lot of bucks to display ads blocked by my adblock extension. I am more concerned about how they track us to not display ads, in fact... I don't remember the last time I saw an ad against my will, and if I actually saw one, I think my brain filtered it just by the power of my revulsion. That said, I am aware that it works at a subconscious level not always like you want but the antidote is to fully use conscious processes in suspicious mode when buying something, isn't it? So, let them pay the internet? If not, you really need your product to have a value that exceed its digital form, like you can see with Steam who appeal to players by connecting games to social. Or you need to be really pedagogic and make the purchase an active act of support. Blendle is on the right direction with centralization + micro-payments but it should add a social layer where users could build another public identity with their stories listings, allowing them to comment, creating thematic feeds, make them addicted with superficial achievements, like I said: extra value other than just paying for something digital. I am not saying that's what I want.
sna1l 10y ago
A lot of people not in the Hacker News/tech world will definitely won't want to pay for internet content. People grew up with the internet being free, which alone will make most people extremely hesitant to pay for content. People LIKE the free crap content on the web. There is a reason websites like Buzzfeed, upworthy, <fill in click baity website here> have become popular.
- deleted 10y ago
  [deleted]
- jakub_g 10y ago
  I grew up accustomed to not paying for stuff because 1) it was free 2) I had no money. Now with the quality of stuff going downway spiral and my dev salary allowing me to pay, I could be potentially paying for quality content if a good, seamless micropayments standard emerged. I think ideal smooth, frictionless micropayments solution could be integrated on the browser level. It is hard a problem due to UX considerations, fraud (clickjacking) etc. but imagine this: There's a UI control built-in with the browser that is a button like 'pay 0.05$ for this article' (amount and some payment metadata embedded in the HTML page). The payment method is controlled somehow by the browser. On Android it caould be maybe integrated with Play Store payments, which already allows me e.g. to add a fee to my ISP phone/internet invoice. For security, the payments would not be instant, but require an interaction with a browser built-in special page that lists to whom you pay how much and make you verify/correct it ('will pay 0.30c to NYT for this and that article and 0.15c to WSJ for that, proceed?'). You will get a notification from browser once in a while. With such model it is voluntary micropayments though which may not seduce big players though.
  - x0x0 10y ago
    $.05 as the author mentions is a ludicrous sum; less than a penny (your 0.3 cent or 0.15c!) is a laughably small sum, and I doubt sustainable (it doesn't take much fraud to eat all your profits when you make so little per user. Think Google's customer service is horrible? Just wait...) If a customer service agent costs $25/hour all in (terrible wages, desk, taxes), every hour they clock in consumes the profit from 500 articles at $0.05 per, even before any other costs. Consider the nyt sells their cheapest digital subscription for $0.60/day. Why on earth should they price articles for less than that, considering you probably aren't going to read an article every day? They certainly don't want to cannibalize their subscribers already paying $0.60/day. And note that keeping eg a reporter in Egypt is expensive. Further, even if you reply that they're only getting 5 cents for the ads you see (they get more: probably $100+ cpms for pmp ads), they can't afford to trade one-for-one: the people most likely to pay not to see ads are often the ones who advertisers most want to advertise to. ie people with disposable income. I'd imagine the NYT would need $2+ per article for the economics to work for them. And quite possibly much more.
mark_l_watson 10y ago
A nice article, but David only posted the first half with a teaser at the end. evonomics looks like a nice site, browsing the table of contents. Google aggregates small $1 charity donations in One a Day, and then periodically bills you for a few weeks worth of donations. I don't see why individual companys couldn't provide the same with micro-payments if they were federated so one service would allow people to micro pay on any site supported by a federated partner.
- ktRolster 10y ago
  Google has a program like that: https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/ https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/
  - educar 10y ago
    It doesn't work the way you think it does.
ares2012 10y ago
The "End of Advertising" on the web is something I hear fairly often, and the argument that paying for content is the only solution follows soon after. Unfortunately, both history and all of our data suggests otherwise. For example, the mobile app ecosystem (the only large scale experiment we've run in online media since the web) started with a pay-for-use business model in the form of paid apps. While this worked for a while, it quickly gave way to free apps supported by advertising or other business models. Today, unless you are a game, it is almost impossible to build a business using pay-for-use exclusively. Reversing to a free model was forced by the low cost of entry into the market and resulting commoditization of mobile apps. You can't charge for something if a dozen other people will offer it for free. I'm not a huge supporter of online ads and I do think the industry needs to improve. However, we continue to see that it is the only stable economic model for online media considering the volume and diversity the model needs to cover. Until someone shows something else working at scale, let's not throw away the only thing that is working.
- onion2k 10y ago
  You can't charge for something if a dozen other people will offer it for free. If that's true, and at the same time people dislike adverts enough that a significant proportion will refuse to interact with them or even block them, then the market won't generate enough money to pay for the production of those apps. In the short term people will pay to make those apps by subsidising them with investment money (and lose it all if they don't make any money back), but in the long term we simply won't have people making the apps. At that point the market will be underserved, customers who have a demand for the product will start to pay, and the pay-for business model starts working, driven by revenue rather than DAUs and ad impressions. There's no reason to believe the end for advertising means the end of media. There is a demand for the products, and suppliers will continue to provide such products. What's needed is a working business model that both sides of the market are happy with. That doesn't appear to be advertising-lead.
  - stevesearer 10y ago
    I'd be interested in your feedback on my site (in my profile). It is advertising-driven but I maintain some standards which my readers have appreciated: ads must relevant, not animated, and they are self-hosted. At this point I don't think advertisers have had any issues with those rules and because of my repeat customers, I believe they get the results they are looking for. It might be possible to charge readers, but I'm more interested in trying out good advertising practices instead.
adrianratnapala 10y ago
I was a bit disappointed. From the headline I thought it was an argument about why the ad-fueled internet is economically unstastainable. Instead Brin is mainly repeating the "moral" case against it while making some (reasonable) suggestions about why micropayments are not so impossible after all. The later point might be right, but only likely to be tested if there is an advertising bust. At least Brin links to this (http://idlewords.com/2015/11/the_advertising_bubble.htm http://idlewords.com/2015/11/the_advertising_bubble.htm).
sliken 10y ago
What I've always wondered. Why do so many sites show TONS of ads likely making incredibly small amounts of money from my eyeballs? Why not let me pay twice what they get from the advertisers to completely disable ads? Google has some program like this for awhile anyways, but they never promised zero ads, just less.
- arjie 10y ago
  Here's an answer from other HN threads. No one wants to buy a membership for the following reasons (in concert): * no unified marketplace means you have to buy a variety of memberships. * no established micro-transaction provider means costs are going to be above minimum credit card transaction fees which makes multiple memberships expensive. * ad block is free. If you're an established brand, you can count on some degree of good will. People will pay for the NYT, the WSJ, and the Economist. They'll pay for the LWN for a similar reason. But for BuzzFeed? Probably not. And for Random Site K, not a chance. I mean, would _you_ pay to use SpeedTest.net?
- meric 10y ago
  They do this with mobile phone apps. ~$2 for an app with no ads, or use the free, "lite" version with ads.
  - bigbugbag 10y ago
    Which is very different from a website.
- rgossiaux 10y ago
  >Why not let me pay twice what they get from the advertisers to completely disable ads? Because the people who opt out will be the people who it's most valuable to advertise to. The people who'd opt out are almost certainly worth much more than 2x the average user. The amount you'd have to charge to make this work is probably reasonably significant.
teknopaul 10y ago
Article treats online journalism as "the Internet". The Internet is fine, the web is fine, online journalism has problems. What do they expect after a couple of years of the worst journalism the world has seen. Clickbait is not viable, well good riddance. Write something factual that we don't know instead. When journalism reports facts again in a manner that treats us like adults people might read it. They might trust the economic advice along side the article too. But when have newspapers ever taken the stance that advertising should be informational and beneficial for the user. If people don't click it's not just the article that is inappropriate, the advert is too.
- afarrell 10y ago
  > people might read it But will people pay for it? You cannot pay your rent or student loans with exposure.
  - PavlovsCat 10y ago
    I would assume not everybody who is now in the click bait "journalism" and blog spam business could actually be a journalist. So if those would simply be starved off (which is a big if, bordering on utopia, I admit that), there would be a lot more eyeballs for those who remain; add to that figuring out micro-payments and getting rid of the bloated ad networks (if you must have ads, display a few curated ones for things you actually can endorse), and suddenly the situation is a lot less bleak. If there was "free food" but after a while it was watered down so much and had so many additives that it just made you sick and left you hungry, why wouldn't you go back to normal food? Yes, it's infinitely more expensive than "free", but getting sick from it and still being hungry also has all sorts of hidden costs. So, where's the free market with people operating in their own interest, right?
    - icebraining 10y ago
      add to that figuring out micro-payments That sounds like "the proof is left as an exercise for the reader."
dasil003 10y ago
I have no idea what the proposed "secret sauce" will be, and the article touches on many good point, but here's the big unavoidable problem: this is all wishful thinking. Usable micropayments and customers paying for online articles will not emerge simply as a result of sufficient hand-wringing. What will make micropayments happen isnot disenfranchised journalists or charity thereupon by techno-utopians. Instead it will come from something with much different and forward-looking goals, like Bitcoin. Bitcoin actually has the properties to make micropayments viable in a way that anything resembling traditional economic payments simply cannot because of overhead (especially considering fraud). However Bitcoin still has to cross the chasm to mainstream usage before we can even dream of such benefits trickling down to online journalism, and I doubt it will because of the next problem... Content is cheap! The article misattributes the state of online content as caused by the "original sin" of starting advertising, as if that decision happened in a vacuum. But of course from the very beginning the web dramatically lowered the cost of publishing and distribution. Initially there was at least a technical barrier to entry, but that has come down over time as well to the current state of Medium, Facebook, Instagram. The reason people expect free content is not because someone decided it had to be ad-supported, but because having an audience is the first step towards any type of monetization. Once you have an audience you can leverage it in all sorts of ways, some involving charging (eg. The Economist) and some involving branding/funnel-building (eg. Signal vs. Noise), but most people do not, and therefore there will always be a stream of people ready to put out free content just to get noticed. The fact that this dynamic is killing journalism as we know it is not going to change any incentives or behavior. It's not enough to say "all we need is X to save journalism", you have to explain who is going to build X, why they will do it, and why will users adopt it. I don't believe that enough people are bothered by the current state of affairs that getting rid of advertising, or paying journalists directly will resonate in any meaningful way. That doesn't mean people won't pay for content—obviously they do pay for content—but you have to give them something they think is worth paying for. That's not to take anything away from ambitious attempts at alternative funding methods, but fighting against the fundamental market dynamics is not the way to do it, you have to come up with ideas and concepts that resonate with current trends and modes of thinking.
- drjesusphd 10y ago
eva1984 10y ago
Money can maintain. People need to PAY.
fauigerzigerk 10y ago
What? Ten minutes of your time isn’t worth five cents? What aggravates users about current pay-for-use methods is not cost, but hassle of transaction. That is in fact the main fallacy. I "read" about 50 articles per day. That's 18250 per year. If my attention is worth $100 per year and half of that goes towards articles I read, that's not 5 cents per article but 0.27 cents.
pmontra 10y ago
> Examine this truism — that you would never pay a nickel for a New York Times article that you enjoyed. What? Ten minutes of your time isn’t worth five cents? Some questions: - Do I have to pay in advance, before knowing that I enjoyed an article? - How would I feel skimming in 30 seconds through an article that I had to pay for and move on to the next one? This is something I do routinely. Would I keep paying for that or would I totally skip paid-for articles? - Why should I pay for that NYT article and not for a free one from Reuters with about the same content? Should we differentiate between plain news, opinions, investigative journalism? I understand that somebody writing a blog gets paid by something else and the journalist gets paid by that very article, but the journalist is competing for reader time (time, not news) with so many other things, from instant messaging to casual browsing. To answer the question... 100k readers * 5 cents = 5k. Too much or too little? Did the article took a hour, a day, a month, a year to write? If it's a hour, no way, even 1 cent would be too much. If it's a month it's spot on, maybe even cheap. But competition from free news, even the ones reporting on that article, is hard to beat.
- jmhnilbog 10y ago
  Isn't the value of the article completely divorced from the time it took to write it? (I don't pay more for a movie that took five years to make than one that took a week.) News is one of the more obvious examples that things become less valuable as more people have access. If I am the only person in a room to have read an article, I am more interesting at a party. If everyone read it, I might as well be discussing the weather. If I find out about an earnings report a microsecond before other investors, that news is much more valuable to me than it is to them. Journalists also have to deal with instances where weeks of effort failt to uncover anything worth writing about. The patron/artist model might be the only way to support individual journalists. It might turn out that journalism looks a LOT like private investigation or corporate espionage.
lucaspiller 10y ago
Are there any good donation platforms that are easy for both an end user and a publisher to implement? At the end of the article is a donation section, but instead of a simple 'donate 5c' button it asks for my personal details, defaults to making me donate X/month and then finally redirects me to PayPal.
lottin 10y ago
It's basic economics. All else equal, an increase in the supply of a good drives its price down. In the past, journalists had a monopoly on journalism. Nowadays, anyone can write a piece of journalism and publish it, which means now we have a larger supply and lower prices. How lower? Apparently, close to zero, since a lot of people are willing to provide content for free. It turns out creating content is something that can be fun.
- raarts 10y ago
  "Creating content" is not the same as journalism. The Web as it stands now is generally low quality. It remains to be seen if people are willing to pay more for higher quality.
  - lottin 10y ago
    What constitutes good quality is a matter of opinion. Look at the top 3 UK newspapers, they aren't exactly what most people would consider quality journalism but they're the most successful nonetheless. At any rate, the same simple principle applies. Supply and demand will determine the price.
  - orbifold 10y ago
    The problem is even journalism in main stream print media is often of low quality. This just not obvious to most people because they tend to not have domain knowledge about the things that journalists usually write about. But judging from how they report on things related to physics and mathematics, my guess is they are equally uninformed and imprecise, when it comes to foreign policy, financial or economic news. The truly competent people in those fields do not become journalists anyways.
Mendenhall 10y ago
Evolve or die. Besides, the net exploded in popularity before ads became popular on it, they are not needed at all. If you cant figure out how to make money off the net without using ads, you have bigger problems.
bnolsen 10y ago
the article wa full of advertising that ground my poor ideapad to a halt. had to close the page before i could read it all.
skoczymroczny 10y ago
Internet has worked before the age of widespread advertising. It will prevail. It might just not be the internet we are having right now. Perhaps it's time to go back to p2p services, simple lightweight websites hosted from home.
awinter-py 10y ago
this is by scifi author david brin! should have put that in the title. scifi authors have opinions that are 30% valid, 130% interesting, 0% status quo.
thebigspacefuck 10y ago
Here is an idea. We put a hidden tag on pages that don't use ads for support, and couple it with a browser extension that would save that tag information over the period of a month. The extension would log how long you spent actively on that tagged page. At the end of the month you could pay what you choose, say $10, and it could subdivide that $10 based on time spent on a page, and factors like page type (for instance if you only want to support small blogs or news sites). This allows people to vote on content with their dollars. They don't have to click donate on every page and they keep their donations in their budget.
- j_s 10y ago
  A couple browser extensions Google'd: https://www.syndicoin.co/ https://www.syndicoin.co/ http://protip.is/ http://protip.is/
  - thebigspacefuck 10y ago
    Neat! That's exactly what I was thinking of.
- Pxtl 10y ago
  iirc there was a company that had a neat approach to this, but was explicity - you'd pay a monthly amount and then let you tip websites you use with a share of that. Lets you spend a predictable monthly amount on web content, but lets you control where the money goes based on what you're doing this month. Sadly the content creators of the net have generally embraced Patreon instead. I get that Patreon is nice because it gives them consistent income, but it seems like the monthly subscription to a single artist approach is too coarse for me to buy into.
deleted 10y ago
[deleted]
bhz 10y ago
[Comment hidden - Please pay $1.50 to read this comment.]
macawfish 10y ago
... at worst, advertising is nothing but a tax on the quality of the internet
sunstone 10y ago
This problem is waiting for the Netflix of publishing. Some people think .05 per article is low when Netflix provides unlimited movies for $10/mo. Netflix recognizes that the cost of distribution has dropped out of sight. Publishing needs to do the same.

134 points by ultrasociality 10y ago

I've believed this for many years. Intrusive advertising is a cost to content consumers, one that they can circumvent by passively or actively ignoring.

gcb0 10y ago

author is clueless about online everything. just like I'm now commenting that he's wrong, if this gets enough votes, should he sends the proceeds of the article to me? internet content now is forums, user generated videos, etc. useless entertainment journalism is dead not because advertisement can't pay the bill. because it's dead.

zer00eyz 10y ago

>Then why have all attempts at commercializing micro-payments failed? I assert that MP constitutes an inherently different market realm, with unique problems and incentives that demand innovative solutions, empowering payment-for-content by individuals surfing the web. There is a pretty simple reason for this: All the embedded players (credit card processors, and banks) don't have the desire to deal with the extremely high volume and low (near zero) margin business this would create for them. Institutions who produce content aren't high on MOST users list of places to give money to when there are plenty of ways to get said product for FREE... You want me to give you $5 today so I can spend $0.03 of it on some article. Maybe I forget about it (good for you) or you loose it (bad for me) and then I have to fight to get it fixed (making this a money loosing proposition on both sides). The greed and avarice, of content producers and advertisers, destroyed what could have been a workable solution (ads), I have no faith that any micropayment platform or what ever else you can cook up is going to work unless it puts USERS FIRST.

maroonblazer 10y ago
>The greed and avarice, of content producers and advertisers, destroyed what could have been a workable solution (ads)... I understand how content producers can be blamed for the state of internet advertising but I don't understand why the advertisers are also implicated. It's the content producers who manufacture and sell the advertising product. If an advertiser doesn't buy the product his competitor will.
- zer00eyz 10y ago
  Totally valid question: How does malware get into ad's, the publishers didn't put it there: http://www.extremetech.com/internet/220696-forbes-forces-readers-to-turn-off-ad-blockers-promptly-serves-malware http://www.extremetech.com/internet/220696-forbes-forces-rea... Meanwhile the industry itself calls ad blocking "immoral": http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/iab-chief-blasts-adblock-plus-immoral-mendacious-coven-techie-wannabes-169194 http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/iab-chief-blasts-adblo... There is this gem linked from the article where some of them admit it might be their fault: http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/iab-pivots-ad-blocking-and-issues-mea-culpa-we-messed-167583 http://www.adweek.com/news/technology/iab-pivots-ad-blocking...
ghaff 10y ago
I don't buy the suggestion that micropayments would work if only there were an easy (for users) and cost-effective way of making and processing them. Yes, there are some chicken and egg issues associated with a payment system that achieves critical mass and that doesn't fragment into a bunch of incompatible providers. But, really, that's mostly just technology and market development. Given the need/demand, I doubt it's even very hard. The bigger issue is probably the one that Clay Shirky offered years ago. Mental transaction costs. If I have to decide up-front whether an article is worth reading for a nickel (or whatever), I'm generally going to pass. At best, I'm going to have to think about clicking and that injects a lot of friction into the process.

boznz 10y ago

I pay my ISP $70/month for a home internet connection. I pay my mobile provider $40/month for 2GB Data I pay $100/Yr to a hosting service for my ad-free web site and email for my business which will always be there while my business is running (as will the ad-free web sites of most other businesses I know of). In addition to the above I pay various donations and subscriptions to certain sites I like and buy almost exclusively on line. It seems to me there is plenty of money to keep the internet going without advertising. To the multitude of news/media/blogs/click-bait sites duplicating the same content and that rely on advertising for their business model then good luck to you all, unobtrusive advertising was and still is ok with me, but because of the bad-apples it is now in your face and I ad-block everything.

alwaysdownvoted 10y ago
I'll bet a lot of folks would keep paying those prices even if all they did was use email. I'll bet further that is still the main reason many people have a home internet connection. That and internet banking, etc. Things subsidized by ads like YouTube and myriad other distractions are a bonus. If they were to disappear no one would be dropping their internet connection. Trust me, with bandwdth as it is, free video is not going to disappear. All things considered I think non-commercial websites like Wikipedia or Internet Archive are actually the most valuable ones. And even without ads they will not disappear because passionate dedicated people create them for non-commercial reasons. And the cost for the individual to store data and publish online keeps decreasing. The internet has heaps of inherent value that has nothing to do with advertising. Especially with today's computing power and bandwidth. It's like long distance calling anywhere in the world for a set monthly fee. And anyone can write software to send and receive over the network. Sign me up. For life. Anyone who used the internet in the late 80's early 90's before commercial activity was permitted, when bandwidth was limited and expensive, knows this. By all means argue for ads if it's your cash cow - try you best to save your golden goose, but spare us the absurd arguments that ads are what give the internet value.
- ktRolster 10y ago
  but spare us the absurd arguments that ads are what give the internet value. Indeed. Some would argue they reduce the value of the internet.

Ileca 10y ago

I am always comforting myself by thinking that idiots who want to tweak my brain were throwing a lot of bucks to display ads blocked by my adblock extension. I am more concerned about how they track us to not display ads, in fact... I don't remember the last time I saw an ad against my will, and if I actually saw one, I think my brain filtered it just by the power of my revulsion. That said, I am aware that it works at a subconscious level not always like you want but the antidote is to fully use conscious processes in suspicious mode when buying something, isn't it? So, let them pay the internet? If not, you really need your product to have a value that exceed its digital form, like you can see with Steam who appeal to players by connecting games to social. Or you need to be really pedagogic and make the purchase an active act of support. Blendle is on the right direction with centralization + micro-payments but it should add a social layer where users could build another public identity with their stories listings, allowing them to comment, creating thematic feeds, make them addicted with superficial achievements, like I said: extra value other than just paying for something digital. I am not saying that's what I want.

sna1l 10y ago

A lot of people not in the Hacker News/tech world will definitely won't want to pay for internet content. People grew up with the internet being free, which alone will make most people extremely hesitant to pay for content. People LIKE the free crap content on the web. There is a reason websites like Buzzfeed, upworthy, <fill in click baity website here> have become popular.

deleted 10y ago
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jakub_g 10y ago
I grew up accustomed to not paying for stuff because 1) it was free 2) I had no money. Now with the quality of stuff going downway spiral and my dev salary allowing me to pay, I could be potentially paying for quality content if a good, seamless micropayments standard emerged. I think ideal smooth, frictionless micropayments solution could be integrated on the browser level. It is hard a problem due to UX considerations, fraud (clickjacking) etc. but imagine this: There's a UI control built-in with the browser that is a button like 'pay 0.05$ for this article' (amount and some payment metadata embedded in the HTML page). The payment method is controlled somehow by the browser. On Android it caould be maybe integrated with Play Store payments, which already allows me e.g. to add a fee to my ISP phone/internet invoice. For security, the payments would not be instant, but require an interaction with a browser built-in special page that lists to whom you pay how much and make you verify/correct it ('will pay 0.30c to NYT for this and that article and 0.15c to WSJ for that, proceed?'). You will get a notification from browser once in a while. With such model it is voluntary micropayments though which may not seduce big players though.
- x0x0 10y ago
  $.05 as the author mentions is a ludicrous sum; less than a penny (your 0.3 cent or 0.15c!) is a laughably small sum, and I doubt sustainable (it doesn't take much fraud to eat all your profits when you make so little per user. Think Google's customer service is horrible? Just wait...) If a customer service agent costs $25/hour all in (terrible wages, desk, taxes), every hour they clock in consumes the profit from 500 articles at $0.05 per, even before any other costs. Consider the nyt sells their cheapest digital subscription for $0.60/day. Why on earth should they price articles for less than that, considering you probably aren't going to read an article every day? They certainly don't want to cannibalize their subscribers already paying $0.60/day. And note that keeping eg a reporter in Egypt is expensive. Further, even if you reply that they're only getting 5 cents for the ads you see (they get more: probably $100+ cpms for pmp ads), they can't afford to trade one-for-one: the people most likely to pay not to see ads are often the ones who advertisers most want to advertise to. ie people with disposable income. I'd imagine the NYT would need $2+ per article for the economics to work for them. And quite possibly much more.

mark_l_watson 10y ago

A nice article, but David only posted the first half with a teaser at the end. evonomics looks like a nice site, browsing the table of contents. Google aggregates small $1 charity donations in One a Day, and then periodically bills you for a few weeks worth of donations. I don't see why individual companys couldn't provide the same with micro-payments if they were federated so one service would allow people to micro pay on any site supported by a federated partner.

ktRolster 10y ago
Google has a program like that: https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/ https://www.google.com/contributor/welcome/
- educar 10y ago
  It doesn't work the way you think it does.

ares2012 10y ago

The "End of Advertising" on the web is something I hear fairly often, and the argument that paying for content is the only solution follows soon after. Unfortunately, both history and all of our data suggests otherwise. For example, the mobile app ecosystem (the only large scale experiment we've run in online media since the web) started with a pay-for-use business model in the form of paid apps. While this worked for a while, it quickly gave way to free apps supported by advertising or other business models. Today, unless you are a game, it is almost impossible to build a business using pay-for-use exclusively. Reversing to a free model was forced by the low cost of entry into the market and resulting commoditization of mobile apps. You can't charge for something if a dozen other people will offer it for free. I'm not a huge supporter of online ads and I do think the industry needs to improve. However, we continue to see that it is the only stable economic model for online media considering the volume and diversity the model needs to cover. Until someone shows something else working at scale, let's not throw away the only thing that is working.

onion2k 10y ago
You can't charge for something if a dozen other people will offer it for free. If that's true, and at the same time people dislike adverts enough that a significant proportion will refuse to interact with them or even block them, then the market won't generate enough money to pay for the production of those apps. In the short term people will pay to make those apps by subsidising them with investment money (and lose it all if they don't make any money back), but in the long term we simply won't have people making the apps. At that point the market will be underserved, customers who have a demand for the product will start to pay, and the pay-for business model starts working, driven by revenue rather than DAUs and ad impressions. There's no reason to believe the end for advertising means the end of media. There is a demand for the products, and suppliers will continue to provide such products. What's needed is a working business model that both sides of the market are happy with. That doesn't appear to be advertising-lead.
- stevesearer 10y ago
  I'd be interested in your feedback on my site (in my profile). It is advertising-driven but I maintain some standards which my readers have appreciated: ads must relevant, not animated, and they are self-hosted. At this point I don't think advertisers have had any issues with those rules and because of my repeat customers, I believe they get the results they are looking for. It might be possible to charge readers, but I'm more interested in trying out good advertising practices instead.

adrianratnapala 10y ago

I was a bit disappointed. From the headline I thought it was an argument about why the ad-fueled internet is economically unstastainable. Instead Brin is mainly repeating the "moral" case against it while making some (reasonable) suggestions about why micropayments are not so impossible after all. The later point might be right, but only likely to be tested if there is an advertising bust. At least Brin links to this (http://idlewords.com/2015/11/the_advertising_bubble.htm http://idlewords.com/2015/11/the_advertising_bubble.htm).

sliken 10y ago

What I've always wondered. Why do so many sites show TONS of ads likely making incredibly small amounts of money from my eyeballs? Why not let me pay twice what they get from the advertisers to completely disable ads? Google has some program like this for awhile anyways, but they never promised zero ads, just less.

arjie 10y ago
Here's an answer from other HN threads. No one wants to buy a membership for the following reasons (in concert): * no unified marketplace means you have to buy a variety of memberships. * no established micro-transaction provider means costs are going to be above minimum credit card transaction fees which makes multiple memberships expensive. * ad block is free. If you're an established brand, you can count on some degree of good will. People will pay for the NYT, the WSJ, and the Economist. They'll pay for the LWN for a similar reason. But for BuzzFeed? Probably not. And for Random Site K, not a chance. I mean, would _you_ pay to use SpeedTest.net?
meric 10y ago
They do this with mobile phone apps. ~$2 for an app with no ads, or use the free, "lite" version with ads.
- bigbugbag 10y ago
  Which is very different from a website.
rgossiaux 10y ago
>Why not let me pay twice what they get from the advertisers to completely disable ads? Because the people who opt out will be the people who it's most valuable to advertise to. The people who'd opt out are almost certainly worth much more than 2x the average user. The amount you'd have to charge to make this work is probably reasonably significant.

teknopaul 10y ago

Article treats online journalism as "the Internet". The Internet is fine, the web is fine, online journalism has problems. What do they expect after a couple of years of the worst journalism the world has seen. Clickbait is not viable, well good riddance. Write something factual that we don't know instead. When journalism reports facts again in a manner that treats us like adults people might read it. They might trust the economic advice along side the article too. But when have newspapers ever taken the stance that advertising should be informational and beneficial for the user. If people don't click it's not just the article that is inappropriate, the advert is too.

afarrell 10y ago
> people might read it But will people pay for it? You cannot pay your rent or student loans with exposure.
- PavlovsCat 10y ago
  I would assume not everybody who is now in the click bait "journalism" and blog spam business could actually be a journalist. So if those would simply be starved off (which is a big if, bordering on utopia, I admit that), there would be a lot more eyeballs for those who remain; add to that figuring out micro-payments and getting rid of the bloated ad networks (if you must have ads, display a few curated ones for things you actually can endorse), and suddenly the situation is a lot less bleak. If there was "free food" but after a while it was watered down so much and had so many additives that it just made you sick and left you hungry, why wouldn't you go back to normal food? Yes, it's infinitely more expensive than "free", but getting sick from it and still being hungry also has all sorts of hidden costs. So, where's the free market with people operating in their own interest, right?
  - icebraining 10y ago
    add to that figuring out micro-payments That sounds like "the proof is left as an exercise for the reader."

dasil003 10y ago

I have no idea what the proposed "secret sauce" will be, and the article touches on many good point, but here's the big unavoidable problem: this is all wishful thinking. Usable micropayments and customers paying for online articles will not emerge simply as a result of sufficient hand-wringing. What will make micropayments happen isnot disenfranchised journalists or charity thereupon by techno-utopians. Instead it will come from something with much different and forward-looking goals, like Bitcoin. Bitcoin actually has the properties to make micropayments viable in a way that anything resembling traditional economic payments simply cannot because of overhead (especially considering fraud). However Bitcoin still has to cross the chasm to mainstream usage before we can even dream of such benefits trickling down to online journalism, and I doubt it will because of the next problem... Content is cheap! The article misattributes the state of online content as caused by the "original sin" of starting advertising, as if that decision happened in a vacuum. But of course from the very beginning the web dramatically lowered the cost of publishing and distribution. Initially there was at least a technical barrier to entry, but that has come down over time as well to the current state of Medium, Facebook, Instagram. The reason people expect free content is not because someone decided it had to be ad-supported, but because having an audience is the first step towards any type of monetization. Once you have an audience you can leverage it in all sorts of ways, some involving charging (eg. The Economist) and some involving branding/funnel-building (eg. Signal vs. Noise), but most people do not, and therefore there will always be a stream of people ready to put out free content just to get noticed. The fact that this dynamic is killing journalism as we know it is not going to change any incentives or behavior. It's not enough to say "all we need is X to save journalism", you have to explain who is going to build X, why they will do it, and why will users adopt it. I don't believe that enough people are bothered by the current state of affairs that getting rid of advertising, or paying journalists directly will resonate in any meaningful way. That doesn't mean people won't pay for content—obviously they do pay for content—but you have to give them something they think is worth paying for. That's not to take anything away from ambitious attempts at alternative funding methods, but fighting against the fundamental market dynamics is not the way to do it, you have to come up with ideas and concepts that resonate with current trends and modes of thinking.

drjesusphd 10y ago

eva1984 10y ago

Money can maintain. People need to PAY.

fauigerzigerk 10y ago

What? Ten minutes of your time isn’t worth five cents? What aggravates users about current pay-for-use methods is not cost, but hassle of transaction. That is in fact the main fallacy. I "read" about 50 articles per day. That's 18250 per year. If my attention is worth $100 per year and half of that goes towards articles I read, that's not 5 cents per article but 0.27 cents.

pmontra 10y ago

> Examine this truism — that you would never pay a nickel for a New York Times article that you enjoyed. What? Ten minutes of your time isn’t worth five cents? Some questions: - Do I have to pay in advance, before knowing that I enjoyed an article? - How would I feel skimming in 30 seconds through an article that I had to pay for and move on to the next one? This is something I do routinely. Would I keep paying for that or would I totally skip paid-for articles? - Why should I pay for that NYT article and not for a free one from Reuters with about the same content? Should we differentiate between plain news, opinions, investigative journalism? I understand that somebody writing a blog gets paid by something else and the journalist gets paid by that very article, but the journalist is competing for reader time (time, not news) with so many other things, from instant messaging to casual browsing. To answer the question... 100k readers * 5 cents = 5k. Too much or too little? Did the article took a hour, a day, a month, a year to write? If it's a hour, no way, even 1 cent would be too much. If it's a month it's spot on, maybe even cheap. But competition from free news, even the ones reporting on that article, is hard to beat.

jmhnilbog 10y ago
Isn't the value of the article completely divorced from the time it took to write it? (I don't pay more for a movie that took five years to make than one that took a week.) News is one of the more obvious examples that things become less valuable as more people have access. If I am the only person in a room to have read an article, I am more interesting at a party. If everyone read it, I might as well be discussing the weather. If I find out about an earnings report a microsecond before other investors, that news is much more valuable to me than it is to them. Journalists also have to deal with instances where weeks of effort failt to uncover anything worth writing about. The patron/artist model might be the only way to support individual journalists. It might turn out that journalism looks a LOT like private investigation or corporate espionage.

lucaspiller 10y ago

Are there any good donation platforms that are easy for both an end user and a publisher to implement? At the end of the article is a donation section, but instead of a simple 'donate 5c' button it asks for my personal details, defaults to making me donate X/month and then finally redirects me to PayPal.

lottin 10y ago

It's basic economics. All else equal, an increase in the supply of a good drives its price down. In the past, journalists had a monopoly on journalism. Nowadays, anyone can write a piece of journalism and publish it, which means now we have a larger supply and lower prices. How lower? Apparently, close to zero, since a lot of people are willing to provide content for free. It turns out creating content is something that can be fun.

raarts 10y ago
"Creating content" is not the same as journalism. The Web as it stands now is generally low quality. It remains to be seen if people are willing to pay more for higher quality.
- lottin 10y ago
  What constitutes good quality is a matter of opinion. Look at the top 3 UK newspapers, they aren't exactly what most people would consider quality journalism but they're the most successful nonetheless. At any rate, the same simple principle applies. Supply and demand will determine the price.
- orbifold 10y ago
  The problem is even journalism in main stream print media is often of low quality. This just not obvious to most people because they tend to not have domain knowledge about the things that journalists usually write about. But judging from how they report on things related to physics and mathematics, my guess is they are equally uninformed and imprecise, when it comes to foreign policy, financial or economic news. The truly competent people in those fields do not become journalists anyways.

Mendenhall 10y ago

Evolve or die. Besides, the net exploded in popularity before ads became popular on it, they are not needed at all. If you cant figure out how to make money off the net without using ads, you have bigger problems.

bnolsen 10y ago

the article wa full of advertising that ground my poor ideapad to a halt. had to close the page before i could read it all.

skoczymroczny 10y ago

Internet has worked before the age of widespread advertising. It will prevail. It might just not be the internet we are having right now. Perhaps it's time to go back to p2p services, simple lightweight websites hosted from home.

awinter-py 10y ago

this is by scifi author david brin! should have put that in the title. scifi authors have opinions that are 30% valid, 130% interesting, 0% status quo.

thebigspacefuck 10y ago

Here is an idea. We put a hidden tag on pages that don't use ads for support, and couple it with a browser extension that would save that tag information over the period of a month. The extension would log how long you spent actively on that tagged page. At the end of the month you could pay what you choose, say $10, and it could subdivide that $10 based on time spent on a page, and factors like page type (for instance if you only want to support small blogs or news sites). This allows people to vote on content with their dollars. They don't have to click donate on every page and they keep their donations in their budget.

j_s 10y ago
A couple browser extensions Google'd: https://www.syndicoin.co/ https://www.syndicoin.co/ http://protip.is/ http://protip.is/
- thebigspacefuck 10y ago
  Neat! That's exactly what I was thinking of.
Pxtl 10y ago
iirc there was a company that had a neat approach to this, but was explicity - you'd pay a monthly amount and then let you tip websites you use with a share of that. Lets you spend a predictable monthly amount on web content, but lets you control where the money goes based on what you're doing this month. Sadly the content creators of the net have generally embraced Patreon instead. I get that Patreon is nice because it gives them consistent income, but it seems like the monthly subscription to a single artist approach is too coarse for me to buy into.

deleted 10y ago

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bhz 10y ago

[Comment hidden - Please pay $1.50 to read this comment.]

macawfish 10y ago

... at worst, advertising is nothing but a tax on the quality of the internet

sunstone 10y ago

This problem is waiting for the Netflix of publishing. Some people think .05 per article is low when Netflix provides unlimited movies for $10/mo. Netflix recognizes that the cost of distribution has dropped out of sight. Publishing needs to do the same.