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But how many users would actually be willing to pay for the content they consume in order to get rid of ads and tracking and excessive data volume consumption?
by danbruc 10y ago
But how many users would actually be willing to pay for the content they consume in order to get rid of ads and tracking and excessive data volume consumption? And how much would they be willing to pay? It seems like they would have to be willing to pay at least an amount comparable to the average ad revenue per user and page view, whatever that actually is.
Just blocking ads is certainly justifiable in the current situation, but it also certainly not sustainable if the ad blocker installation base keeps growing. And buying subscriptions for all sites is not really an option either. It becomes quite expensive pretty quickly, especially if you want the see only a few articles per month on each site but do so on many sites.
- anigbrowl 10y agoLots would if it weren't so inconvenient. I read articles from maybe 100 different news sources in a typical month but realistically I don't want 100 newspaper and magazine subscriptions, or 100 different subscription offers or website accounts. Why isn't there something like a Netflix for News that just gives me news free of visual cruft and takes care of distributing the revenue from what I read in approximately accurate portions to the content providers, not to mention a seamless interface for socially rating and categorizing news? Newspaper/magazine subscriptions made sense when newspapers were heavily local and magazines were periodicals. Neither condition really obtains any more and having multiple subscriptions is not worth the overhead for even a small number of publications. The last time I made the mistake of subscribing to a magazine I also saw a huge increase in junk mail for several years afterwards. GFTO of my mailbox with that shit.
- danbruc 10y agoLots would if it weren't so inconvenient. I am not really sure about that. About 10 % of all Internet users are currently using an ad blocker. So 90 % are okay with ads or don't care or whatever. Further I would estimate that users would have to pay between $5 and $10 per month to pay for the content they consume to provide an income for sites comparable to that of ads. Maybe 1 % of the ad blocker users - number pulled out of thin air - would be willing to replace their ad blocker with a monthly payment of $10 if this would would work frictionless, if you could magically convince the entire Internet to create some Netflix equivalent. In the end that would be 0.1 % of the Internet users which seems not really a huge incentive to bring such a Netflix equivalent into existence.
- d-sc 10y agoThat would be a ~$30 million a year business in the United States alone which would be worthwhile if it was creating revenue out of previously non paying Adblock users. Numbers: Population: 300,000,00 million Percent internet users: 84%
- danbruc 10y agoIt would be $30 millions for all sites combined, only a small fraction of that for each site. And every site would have to invest some money to integrate with such an offering. And you probably need quite a few site to make this work, nobody will pay much if it only gets you access to a hand full of sites. And this number hinges on the assumption of 1 % of the ad blocker user willing to pay which might be wildly optimistic. If it turns out to be only 0.1 %, you are down to $3 million for all sites combined. And there is of course the huge problem of bootstrapping this. Nobody will pay if you have no content to offer, nobody will invest into a solution without customers willing to pay.
- anigbrowl 10y agoThat's exactly what people said about Netflix, so I'm gonna disagree without bothering to support my argument further.
- danbruc 10y agoI actually tend to believe that it could work but I also have some remaining doubts. In my comments I explicitly focused on dismissive arguments and points where I have doubts, hoping that someone would either back those doubts up or refute them. You should definitely not draw the conclusion that I think I could never work from the way I argued.
- pfranz 10y agoI saw https://blendle.com https://blendle.com mentioned on here a few weeks ago. I haven't tried them, but it sounds like what you're looking for.
- anigbrowl 10y agoThanks for the reminder. I had signed up for that and forgotten about it, just activated my beta account so I'll see how it works out. First impressions: nice, but still too heavily branded for my taste. It's awful that I'm an artist but want to put most graphic designers out of work XD