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I've been on the Internet since before advertising became common, and I am not convinced that advertising is the only, or even a good, model for funding either
by Kadin 10y ago
I've been on the Internet since before advertising became common, and I am not convinced that advertising is the only, or even a good, model for funding either content or infrastructure.
The move to advertising as the basis for the Internet has hidden, at least from most users, the cost of running a website and putting content online, which is frankly quite low compared to what it used to be, both in terms of actual money and the time/effort/experience required.
While in the mid/late 90s running a website could be a financially risky proposition (there are all sorts of semi-funny horror stories about people who ran labor of love sites that got Slashdotted and ended up with hundreds of dollars in bandwidth bills), today you can stand up a VPS on a Gigabit connection that's capable of serving orders of magnitude more users than most sites will ever see for a few bucks a month. I don't think that is necessarily a bad entry point for a communications platform that lets you talk to a significant percentage of the global population in one shot.
I'm not convinced that having the dominant model be "labor of love" as opposed to "make $$ off advertising" is necessarily worse or would result in less quality content. The advertising-driven model has given us clickbait and even machine-written garbage articles, link farms, etc., none of which would really exist under a publisher-pays model. There are significant hidden costs to the ad-based model, which are externalized on all players, including hard-to-define costs of privacy in terms of the way major players are incentivized to build detailed dossiers on users in order to improve ad targeting.
- malikNF 10y agoSo if you are not convinced the advert driven model is not "the only, or even a good, model" what is then an alternative. I think the ad model needs to improve where the major players will start enforcing strict rules on what types of adverts are allowed for example, they could reject any advert that waste CPU cycles, reject ones using too much memory, ban buggy adverts. Plus, the number one concern these days, the privacy concern, I am forced to use adblockers everywhere on the Internet except for a few sites because I do not want some company giving me product recommendations just because I had a conversation with a friend about something related.
- foxylad 10y agoSubscriptions. My company only provides services via subscription, which means we can provide great support, continuous development, and no ads. Our customers love this. You could argue that this doesn't solve your problem, because we have to identify you to tell if you have paid or not. But actually paying for a service radically alters the relationship - it's suddenly in our interests to keep your information private, because if we don't you'll stop paying us and move to competitors who can provide better privacy. So we're now on the same side on this issue. The old adage that if it's free, YOU are the product is now understood by more and more people.
- flukus 10y agoThis is great for a lot of things, but I find I suffer from "subscription fatigue" lately where I'm reluctant to sign up for anything new because the amount of subscriptions slowly gets out of control. It might work for netflix and other giants but I'm not sure if it's viable for smaller players.
- nradov 10y agoI think there's a business opportunity for someone to build a subscription management service that acts as an intermediary between users and those smaller players. Make it easy for users to subscribe / unsubscribe, track free trial periods, provide customer service, etc.
- JasonInSeattle 10y agoPatreon is kind of like that...
- malikNF 10y agoSubscriptions are nice, but not for everything, if the entire Internet was a subscription model, that would suck so much you would have to spend atleast 100usd a month to just keep using websites. Even if we have a model where you can subscribe to an array of sites using one service, we will still have the same problem of a few companies being in charge of controlling the information we have access to. Hell it would make tracking even easier. Honestly I don't think we should even think about getting rid of adverts, but I definitely think that these adverts need to focus on being non intrusive, they have to start respecting people's privacy. I would willingly support a product which helps keep something I love online. But I would definitely think twice if that said company tries to get through to me by tracking and observing what I do online.