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May I ask: if one is not "famous" (i.e. popular), why should one expect their site to be profitable from ads alone? If my limited edition, 250-prints-per-month

May I ask: if one is not "famous" (i.e. popular), why should one expect their site to be profitable from ads alone? If my limited edition, 250-prints-per-month 'zine isn't making money, is that the advertising industry's fault, or is there an issue with my expectations? People ask the "how do we fix dwindling ad-based revenue" question all the time. The answer is clear, it's just not what people want to hear: metered paywalls or a subscription model (or, you know, selling an actual product / service). The inevitable response to that is, 'but I don't make enough money off of that.' Well, there you go! To me, that's where it should end. You don't have enough of a readership to support your website as-is. That means you can continue doing it as a labor of love, scale it down to something you can manage and that is profitable, or just, well, accept that your site isn't as great as you thought it was, and that you won't be making as much money off of it as you thought. Isn't this basic market forces at work? I have a suspicion that even if 50% of these sites bloated with ads and deceptive, click-bait content were to die, society as a whole would actually be much better off, and the efforts of people building these kinds of sites and expecting a return would be better directed elsewhere.

arjie 10y ago
Seems a bit disingenuous to suggest a paywall when the first thing anyone does on this website with a paywalled article is attempt to bypass. Such a bad faith move to say "use a paywall" and then promptly follow it up with "and I'll try to bypass it to access the content".
- tokenizerrr 10y ago
  If a site wishes to implement a paywall that is their right. If they wish to implement a bypass, that is also just fine. They choose to implement this bypass because they wish to be indexed by Google. So why shouldn't we make use of that intentionally implement bypass?
  - arjie 10y ago
    Do whatever you find ethical. I'm just here to ensure that people are well informed about the fact that paywall vs. ads is actually paywall with no search engine access vs. paywall which people won't pay for vs. ads. I'm all right with the paywall idea succeeding or failing in a well informed marketplace of ideas.
    - tokenizerrr 10y ago
      Some people pay for the paywall. Especially when these people regularly consume your content. People stumbling in from social media (such as HN) are not regular consumers. Big difference, there.
    - Spivak 10y ago
      I've got a subscription to LWN, I don't think they really care about being indexed by search engines. The ability to send interesting articles to non-subscribers with a special link is pretty nice but I understand that it probably wouldn't work as a model for large websites.
      - nradov 10y ago
        It works for WSJ.com, which is a large website.
  - robryan 10y ago
    If the paywall can't be bypassed a website won't get linked anywhere and will lose most of it's traffic. The biggest media sites in the world struggle to make this model work.
cr0sh 10y ago
I kinda agree with you; I run a personal website, it isn't very popular (and I don't update it often - hmm, maybe there's a link there!) - but it is my website, and I've kept the domain active since 1998 or thereabouts. ie - a "labor of love" How do I pay for it? Well, I reach around to my back pocket for my wallet, and... I don't have ads, I don't have a sponsorship, and I don't care - what I have and what I put on my website is strictly for myself and others to use or read as they see fit; I consider it a "giving back" to others out there for what the internet has given me over the years. ...and I am fine with that. Other sites need to realize this too; not everything is worth money, and if you really love what you're doing, you'd give it away free. Like the internet used to be - everybody doing it for the love of networking and computing and knowledge and information transfer. Not AOL spam making money crap.
- Laforet 10y ago
  Seconded. I run two small websites with hundreds and sometimes thousands of PV per day on a server I am already using for other things. The only thing I really pay for is the domain which is a drop in the bucket anyway. I might give a random shoutout to Cloudflare here as well: Not everybody agree with their way of doing.things but from my point of view they've really helped to cut out a lot of work for personal websites. To my knowledge, most people who make money on their websites are either big enough to monetise with sponsorship/subscription, or they'd run a number of smaller sites of no consequence nor unique content anyway. The latter has no real reason to exist.
- arjie 10y ago
  > ...if you really love what you're doing, you'd give it away free. This doesn't make sense. It follows logically that we should all not love what we do for a living. That strikes me as an absurd conclusion.
  - dwaltrip 10y ago
    If you can't make money from it, then it's not an absurd conclusion at all. Of course, it means one needs a day job, but such is life.
komali2 10y ago
On the other hand, this will lead to us only being able to read the blogs and personal websites of people who are able to dip into their own money and time to make and host a blog. I'd be very interested in reading about the life of exactly not that kind of person.
- tejtm 10y ago
  I am not expecting metered paywalls will help with that.
- JoshTriplett 10y ago
  > On the other hand, this will lead to us only being able to read the blogs and personal websites of people who are able to dip into their own money and time to make and host a blog. If you just want a blog or simple personal website, a hundred different services will host that for you for free, including Github, Wordpress, Tumblr, and others.
- CIPHERSTONE 10y ago
  I'd disagree with you a bit. It's perfectly possible to host a blog for free on Github or other sources (can even use jekyll themes) and just pay the yearly cost for a domain name. A domain name costs $10-20 a year. That's affordable.
- ACow_Adonis 10y ago
  Except you have to trade that off with the diluted-density of having the internet filled with all these people whose blogs and things are either specifically geared towards, if not toxically influenced by, making money and coddling up to advertisers. And also it doesn't happen. Turns out people who want to write/paint will write/paint. The internet was around before advertising. We had free sites back in the day. We've got free sites now. And we can fight for taxes to pay for public libraries, access points, community groups, or even philanthropists to set up free servers. It was actually a pretty cool place (i thought). I mean, I use adblockers to try to simulate it, and am horrified every time I use the web at work without one, but even my ad blocker can't remove the influence and draw of content and material pumped out by money hungry people vs people actually interested in writing/painting/expressing its opinion for its own sake, and the way that profit motive subtly influences the ratio of content produced, and the content and style of that material as well. Its much more liberating as an author to just say "fuck them", rather than continually go "well, it slows down the page load/breaks up the article, but it will result in 0.01% more views/might piss off my sponsors/industry". Not so naive as to say that isn't always an issue, but its pretty clear to me what side of the line advertising is on...
Melk 10y ago
That's a surprising statement coming from an otherwise libertarian leaning HN. The ad market is one of the largest and most successful of the 21st century. Isn't that the definition of a market economy? Until recently OP monetized his blog with ads. Should he have given up before his blog was popular enough to switch to sponsors?
emrgx 10y ago
>>Isn't this basic market forces at work? I have a suspicion that even if 50% of these sites bloated with ads and deceptive, click-bait content were to die, society as a whole would actually be much better off, and the efforts of people building these kinds of sites and expecting a return would be better directed elsewhere. I agree. Most news sites just regurgitate the same articles with their own click bait title which takes you to some adware bloated page. I think there's plenty of money in online ads but the market is too saturated.
munificent 10y ago
> The answer is clear, it's just not what people want to hear: metered paywalls or a subscription model (or, you know, selling an actual product / service). That basically says the art only worth caring about is art produced by artists who produce a large, consistent volume of work. Any one who produces small things, or infrequent things, falls under the threshold where the perceived effort to set up a subscription or pay is greater than the value of the content. They'll get nothing. Granularity and transaction size really matters, especially for the bite-sized content people consume on the web. Your suggestion of paywalls and subscriptions is like a market that only deals in hundred dollar bills. How well would that work for your average mom-and-pop store or independent musician?
- imgabe 10y ago
  Websites costing single digit dollars per month can handle thousands of visitors. At the mom-and-pop level you're talking about it, just about anyone working a job capable of supporting themselves can afford to put up a website. And yes, the default state of art is for nobody to care about it. The art we care about tends to be exceptional. That's why we care about it.
- jdmichal 10y ago
  I'm not sure art is the exemplar you want to bring up. There's a reason that the "starving artist" is a meme. And, previous to modern times, art was largely a patronage-based business. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patronage#Arts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patronage#Arts
  - munificent 10y ago
    I never claimed earlier economic models for creative works were optimal either. :) But I do think with today's increasingly short attention spans, the granularity of consuming creative works keeps going down, which makes the transaction friction more and more of a problem.
- cookiecaper 10y ago
  The issue is that it's too difficult for readers to have a subscription to everything. Someone needs to come in and make a voluntary content network. Add the extension to your browser and it tracks which sites you spend your time on. Content providers get a payout at the end of the month reflecting the value that readers/subscribers derived that month. If someone without a subscription accesses the page, it will be a) monetized by ads or b) available under a limited free readership ceiling, like WSJ/NYT do (content providers could potentially be incentivized with a larger portion of proceeds to choose this option). I know there are a couple of people working on something similar to this on HN, because I've mentioned something like it a few times and they've replied saying they're working on it. ;) There was one in particular that I was following, but I remember when they launched there was a fatal flaw in their model (maybe it was bitcoin only? I don't remember). I don't recall the name now.
munchbunny 10y ago
You have a point that people who aren't famous wouldn't be getting much money anyway. But that's not exactly the criticism. The criticism is that someone who doesn't have a large viewer base isn't in a position to get sponsors, so this approach is literally not viable until you're big enough that sponsors would even think about it. Most people aren't that big.
euske 10y ago
I personally agree with you, but this sounds like a typical "get big or get out" argument. There could be some middle grounds.
tikwidd 10y ago
The Long Tail[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_tail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_tail

arjie 10y ago

Seems a bit disingenuous to suggest a paywall when the first thing anyone does on this website with a paywalled article is attempt to bypass. Such a bad faith move to say "use a paywall" and then promptly follow it up with "and I'll try to bypass it to access the content".

tokenizerrr 10y ago
If a site wishes to implement a paywall that is their right. If they wish to implement a bypass, that is also just fine. They choose to implement this bypass because they wish to be indexed by Google. So why shouldn't we make use of that intentionally implement bypass?
- arjie 10y ago
  Do whatever you find ethical. I'm just here to ensure that people are well informed about the fact that paywall vs. ads is actually paywall with no search engine access vs. paywall which people won't pay for vs. ads. I'm all right with the paywall idea succeeding or failing in a well informed marketplace of ideas.
  - tokenizerrr 10y ago
    Some people pay for the paywall. Especially when these people regularly consume your content. People stumbling in from social media (such as HN) are not regular consumers. Big difference, there.
  - Spivak 10y ago
    I've got a subscription to LWN, I don't think they really care about being indexed by search engines. The ability to send interesting articles to non-subscribers with a special link is pretty nice but I understand that it probably wouldn't work as a model for large websites.
    - nradov 10y ago
      It works for WSJ.com, which is a large website.
- robryan 10y ago
  If the paywall can't be bypassed a website won't get linked anywhere and will lose most of it's traffic. The biggest media sites in the world struggle to make this model work.

cr0sh 10y ago

I kinda agree with you; I run a personal website, it isn't very popular (and I don't update it often - hmm, maybe there's a link there!) - but it is my website, and I've kept the domain active since 1998 or thereabouts. ie - a "labor of love" How do I pay for it? Well, I reach around to my back pocket for my wallet, and... I don't have ads, I don't have a sponsorship, and I don't care - what I have and what I put on my website is strictly for myself and others to use or read as they see fit; I consider it a "giving back" to others out there for what the internet has given me over the years. ...and I am fine with that. Other sites need to realize this too; not everything is worth money, and if you really love what you're doing, you'd give it away free. Like the internet used to be - everybody doing it for the love of networking and computing and knowledge and information transfer. Not AOL spam making money crap.

Laforet 10y ago
Seconded. I run two small websites with hundreds and sometimes thousands of PV per day on a server I am already using for other things. The only thing I really pay for is the domain which is a drop in the bucket anyway. I might give a random shoutout to Cloudflare here as well: Not everybody agree with their way of doing.things but from my point of view they've really helped to cut out a lot of work for personal websites. To my knowledge, most people who make money on their websites are either big enough to monetise with sponsorship/subscription, or they'd run a number of smaller sites of no consequence nor unique content anyway. The latter has no real reason to exist.
arjie 10y ago
> ...if you really love what you're doing, you'd give it away free. This doesn't make sense. It follows logically that we should all not love what we do for a living. That strikes me as an absurd conclusion.
- dwaltrip 10y ago
  If you can't make money from it, then it's not an absurd conclusion at all. Of course, it means one needs a day job, but such is life.

komali2 10y ago

On the other hand, this will lead to us only being able to read the blogs and personal websites of people who are able to dip into their own money and time to make and host a blog. I'd be very interested in reading about the life of exactly not that kind of person.

tejtm 10y ago
I am not expecting metered paywalls will help with that.
JoshTriplett 10y ago
> On the other hand, this will lead to us only being able to read the blogs and personal websites of people who are able to dip into their own money and time to make and host a blog. If you just want a blog or simple personal website, a hundred different services will host that for you for free, including Github, Wordpress, Tumblr, and others.
CIPHERSTONE 10y ago
I'd disagree with you a bit. It's perfectly possible to host a blog for free on Github or other sources (can even use jekyll themes) and just pay the yearly cost for a domain name. A domain name costs $10-20 a year. That's affordable.
ACow_Adonis 10y ago
Except you have to trade that off with the diluted-density of having the internet filled with all these people whose blogs and things are either specifically geared towards, if not toxically influenced by, making money and coddling up to advertisers. And also it doesn't happen. Turns out people who want to write/paint will write/paint. The internet was around before advertising. We had free sites back in the day. We've got free sites now. And we can fight for taxes to pay for public libraries, access points, community groups, or even philanthropists to set up free servers. It was actually a pretty cool place (i thought). I mean, I use adblockers to try to simulate it, and am horrified every time I use the web at work without one, but even my ad blocker can't remove the influence and draw of content and material pumped out by money hungry people vs people actually interested in writing/painting/expressing its opinion for its own sake, and the way that profit motive subtly influences the ratio of content produced, and the content and style of that material as well. Its much more liberating as an author to just say "fuck them", rather than continually go "well, it slows down the page load/breaks up the article, but it will result in 0.01% more views/might piss off my sponsors/industry". Not so naive as to say that isn't always an issue, but its pretty clear to me what side of the line advertising is on...

Melk 10y ago

That's a surprising statement coming from an otherwise libertarian leaning HN. The ad market is one of the largest and most successful of the 21st century. Isn't that the definition of a market economy? Until recently OP monetized his blog with ads. Should he have given up before his blog was popular enough to switch to sponsors?

emrgx 10y ago

>>Isn't this basic market forces at work? I have a suspicion that even if 50% of these sites bloated with ads and deceptive, click-bait content were to die, society as a whole would actually be much better off, and the efforts of people building these kinds of sites and expecting a return would be better directed elsewhere. I agree. Most news sites just regurgitate the same articles with their own click bait title which takes you to some adware bloated page. I think there's plenty of money in online ads but the market is too saturated.

munificent 10y ago

> The answer is clear, it's just not what people want to hear: metered paywalls or a subscription model (or, you know, selling an actual product / service). That basically says the art only worth caring about is art produced by artists who produce a large, consistent volume of work. Any one who produces small things, or infrequent things, falls under the threshold where the perceived effort to set up a subscription or pay is greater than the value of the content. They'll get nothing. Granularity and transaction size really matters, especially for the bite-sized content people consume on the web. Your suggestion of paywalls and subscriptions is like a market that only deals in hundred dollar bills. How well would that work for your average mom-and-pop store or independent musician?

imgabe 10y ago
Websites costing single digit dollars per month can handle thousands of visitors. At the mom-and-pop level you're talking about it, just about anyone working a job capable of supporting themselves can afford to put up a website. And yes, the default state of art is for nobody to care about it. The art we care about tends to be exceptional. That's why we care about it.
jdmichal 10y ago
I'm not sure art is the exemplar you want to bring up. There's a reason that the "starving artist" is a meme. And, previous to modern times, art was largely a patronage-based business. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patronage#Arts https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Patronage#Arts
- munificent 10y ago
  I never claimed earlier economic models for creative works were optimal either. :) But I do think with today's increasingly short attention spans, the granularity of consuming creative works keeps going down, which makes the transaction friction more and more of a problem.
cookiecaper 10y ago
The issue is that it's too difficult for readers to have a subscription to everything. Someone needs to come in and make a voluntary content network. Add the extension to your browser and it tracks which sites you spend your time on. Content providers get a payout at the end of the month reflecting the value that readers/subscribers derived that month. If someone without a subscription accesses the page, it will be a) monetized by ads or b) available under a limited free readership ceiling, like WSJ/NYT do (content providers could potentially be incentivized with a larger portion of proceeds to choose this option). I know there are a couple of people working on something similar to this on HN, because I've mentioned something like it a few times and they've replied saying they're working on it. ;) There was one in particular that I was following, but I remember when they launched there was a fatal flaw in their model (maybe it was bitcoin only? I don't remember). I don't recall the name now.

munchbunny 10y ago

You have a point that people who aren't famous wouldn't be getting much money anyway. But that's not exactly the criticism. The criticism is that someone who doesn't have a large viewer base isn't in a position to get sponsors, so this approach is literally not viable until you're big enough that sponsors would even think about it. Most people aren't that big.

euske 10y ago

I personally agree with you, but this sounds like a typical "get big or get out" argument. There could be some middle grounds.

tikwidd 10y ago

The Long Tail[1] [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_tail https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Long_tail