8 ms·

I think I speak for many when I say: "Cry me a river."

by nathanaldensr 9y ago

tootie 9y ago
No ad revenue, no free content. Get ready for paywalls everywhere.
- JadeNB 9y ago
  > No ad revenue, no free content. Get ready for paywalls everywhere. Well, paywalls lots of places. There'll be less incentive for clickfarming sites, and some-to-many-to-all of the big sites will probably go for-pay, but lots of smaller sites will still provide content because people like to communicate with the world. It doesn't sound like a bad thing to me—especially if we're being told that the trade-off is paying for content, versus giving up rights to our privacy.
- chimmy_chonga 9y ago
  They can still make money off ad revenue, they'll just have to think of a way to do it without compromising the user's privacy.
  - wadkar 9y ago
    Good point, the ads could be content driven rather than user profile driven.
    - openasocket 9y ago
      I really really think this is the way to go. When I'm on programming websites I want ads from cloud providers, and when I'm wood working websites I want ads for belt sanders. I feel like it makes more sense to display ads that match up with the content of the web page anyway, it means the viewer might be in a more receptive mood for that type of product. Not to mention it avoids the entire issue of user privacy and the difficulty of tracking users. It's also how all advertising has been done since the beginning of time, and I don't see why the Internet has to be such a special case.
      - mark-r 9y ago
        The internet was a special case simply because it made it possible to do a better job of predicting your interests. At that point it became an arms race because you didn't want to spend on ads that were less effective than your competitor's. If we went back to content-based advertising those ad dollars wouldn't disappear, the distribution would just change.
    - ThorAndZeus 9y ago
      Very good point indeed. And that is how the publishing industry used to do with segmented magazines. Each publication built their own reader's profile and ad agencies would chose a publication over another based on who they would like to target. That is a much more ethical approach, in my opinion.
      - grigjd3 9y ago
        This still happens with online ads, but supply quality matters. Location of an ad, quality of the domain (ESPN is very good value). But roughly 100 junk auctions come in (no bidder) for every ok auction (single bid reduces to floor) and just a tenth of that represents a good location (bids drive the price above the floor). So yes, people still hit up espn's college football pages with truck ads and the Washington post got targeted for ads by the Bahraini embassy trying to drum up support during their spat with Saudi Arabia.
  - JadeNB 9y ago
    > They can still make money off ad revenue, they'll just have to think of a way to do it without compromising the user's privacy. Look, let's not get drastic. Obviously the first step is to whine about it, and behave as if the user's respect for privacy is tantamount to theft. Ooh, maybe try getting some laws passed criminalising ad blocking! (I am not sure whether that is implausibly ridiculous or a simple description of facts.)
  - ucaetano 9y ago
    Sure, but they would only make a fraction of what they make today, most creators would go out of business and most free services would be shut down.
    - nradov 9y ago
      That would be an acceptable outcome.
      - ucaetano 9y ago
        Reduced economic activity, increased unemployment and poverty is for you an acceptable outcome so that you personally don't have to see ads? Wow...
        AlexandrB 9y ago
        > Reduced economic activity, increased unemployment and poverty "Won't someone PLEASE think of the children!!!!" There are already non-ad-supported funding alternatives for small creators (like Patreon). Maybe the loss of an ad-supported web would finally create sufficient interest in development of micropayment and microfunding services to help the rest. Edit: and maybe we can finally rid the web of clickbait and Taboola-style garbage content.
        ucaetano 9y ago
        It wouldn't work. Ads work because you're trading something that is worth more to the publisher than to you. Let's imagine a utility currency called bananas. A piece of your attention is worth 0 bananas to you. But it is worth 10 bananas to a publisher. The cost of creating and serving you a piece of content is 5 bananas to the publisher, and the value of it to you is 2 bananas. If there were no ads, you'd be willing to pay 2 bananas to the publisher, which would not cover the cost. Therefore, the publisher and content creators would go out of business. You wouldn't be willing to pay the full cost (5 bananas), because the content isn't worth that much to you. Outome: You: 0 bananas Publisher: 0 bananas By seeing the ad, you generate 10 bananas of value to the publisher and content creator, while you get 2 bananas of value by receiving the content. Outcome: You: 2 bananas Publisher: 10 bananas Direct funding will never fully replace ad revenue.
- wadkar 9y ago
  Will paywalls assure privacy? Will paying for content guarantee no tracking JavaScript (I’m looking at you Google Analytics). How many would be willing to pay for a simple non-js HTML that’s just plain content?
  - lern_too_spel 9y ago
    With a paywall, the news site gets you to log in, which gives them a first party cookie and a way to track you cross-device that breaks ITP — if you pay for news, you likely read it every day. They're not going to overlook that additional source of income just because you pay them, just like print newspapers didn't keep ads out of subscribers' newspapers.
- letsgetphysITal 9y ago
  I'm fine with advertising; I see it every day on TV, in magazines, as I walk down the street. What the ad networks want, though, is pervasive, persistent, personally identifiable cross-domain tracking across the entire WWW. Obnoxious and unskippable autoplaying videos. Obnoxious, garish popups. 1/5 of the on screen real estate to be advertising often only loosely related to the content, more often than not totally disinteresting to the reader, and potentially serving up malware via their active content. No. Apple is doing the right thing, and the networks brought it on themselves. I have ZERO sympathy, and anyone who relies on their parasitic behaviour to exist doesn't really offer any value worth paying for anyway. I bet content becomes meaningful enough to be worth paying for, as the rest will die.
  - clarkenheim 9y ago
    I don't necessarily think this is true. Advertisers want to be able to attribute revenue to the types of ads that they show, that way they can spend less money on advertising and focus it on the channels which actually work for them. Cookies are the best way of attributing online ads to online sales. TL;DR they want effective attribution, not to wreck your browsing experience.
    - jtbayly 9y ago
      Sure. They want effective attribution, because that leads to more effective ads. But they are also perfectly willing to do any and all of those other things to get "effective ads." Those other things mean that the next big data hack/leak won't be your SSN & DOB, but your SSN, DOB, and porn preference.
  - geocar 9y ago
    > What the ad networks want... What advertisers want is a real, credible KPI. When it's television, and you can show evidence that 2m people watch this program, so sponsoring gets you 2m of your target audience (or whatever you want to argue). With online, there are few web pages that get 2m people to read them in a day... and surely there's some effect from all those other sites out there. Some of them are even niche, so they might be a hard audience to get... Ad networks offer "all those other sites", and since you can't verify that the 50 people who went to that web page aren't included in the 20 people who read that other web page without "cross-domain tracking" you can't piggy-back on that argument being made in Television. Then you've got the second-screen phenomenon: Few people had two televisions in the same room, but almost everyone has at least two screens. Did I get this part of my target audience on their phone or on the desktop. Choices are, buy everyone twice (halving the advertising budget), or be a little more efficient: Ad networks know what they'd prefer, so they want that tracking to personally identify you now. These ad networks are the ones convincing advertisers they need a super mega cookie to track everything. And so on.
- oneeyedpigeon 9y ago
  Quite aside from other arguments, there was plenty of free content before advertisers caught onto the www, and there's still quite a bit to be found.
- jumpman500 9y ago
  I would be happy to deal with more paywalls. Anytime there is an ad free version of an app I'll buy it. I've even started paying for most of the newspapers I regular. I think we could see a huge improvement in online content quality if people started paying for stuff they like with real money, rather than paying by being distracted by ads.
  - epicide 9y ago
    Exactly. There is a huge jump in quality of content when you are trying to get users to pay for your work rather than just trying to just get enough people to click on it. It requires you to actually deliver on your promise. Sustained interaction and user satisfaction require more thought process than just slapping a clickbait title on something. In reality, clickbait titles work all too well. Will we lose some good businesses and content creators? Most definitely, but the good (and lucky) ones will adapt and it sets a MUCH better model for future creators.
- romanovcode 9y ago
  I rather pay for quality and then get free shit.
- epicide 9y ago
  I would rather have content creators competing for my money and my satisfaction rather than JUST my initial interest and attention.
- ThorAndZeus 9y ago
  I much rather pay (I already do) for quality, non-bullshit, level headed content than consume lots of meaningless articles that server as click bait.
- scarface74 9y ago
  I pay for Netflix, Hulu's ad free tier, and CBS's ad free tier. I would pay for content on the web I find compelling. But these days I get most of my content from podcasts. Their ads are more relevant, less intrusive and I can press a button on my headphones or in my car to do a 30 second skip. But usually I'll listen to an ad read by a new sponsor. It's a win-win. The cpm's for podcast are much better than for the web or even YouTube.
- colmvp 9y ago
  Fine by me. I pay for various subscriptions ranging from Spotify, to creators on Patreon, to streamers on Twitch.
- pjmlp 9y ago
  Fine by me, the guy at the newspaper stand doesn't give me the magazines and books for free.
- ashark 9y ago
  Considering we're in an unprecedented content boom, this would harm me not at all and might even help. The free content might go back to being good stuff from enthusiasts rather than SEO-gaming junk. Signal-to-noise might improve. Interoperable standards for services like messaging might start to matter again.
- diffeomorphism 9y ago
  Who suggested anything about "no ad revenue"? Currently invasive advertising is better payed. However, there is no reason to believe that prices will stay the same if all advertisers are forced to satisfy some reasonable privacy standards. That is what is being suggested, not abolishing all forms of advertisement.
- syrrim 9y ago
  You're on a free website that has no (explicit) ads right now.
  - logfromblammo 9y ago
    Rather than pay someone else to rent their user-tracking advertising system, YC built a platform where their target audience comes to them--sometimes compulsively. The influencers and evangelists among us can then multiply awareness to different audiences on their own platforms. Whenever they want to advertise a YC business, they can just pin a story to the front page for a few hours. It's smart, subtle, seamlessly non-intrusive, and one of the better advertising experiences (relative to other ad-delivery systems), in my opinion. If you haven't noticed, you need to tune your detector a bit closer to the noise floor.
- naravara 9y ago
  >No ad revenue, no free content. Get ready for paywalls everywhere. I'm fine with that. Let the media get its money by providing content that I like and want to pay for instead of by trying to game social media clicks. Most of the "content" online is the reading equivalent of junk-food anyway. Besides, there is a version of an ad supported economy that is actually respectful towards your users. You just do sponsored posts and unobtrusive banners. That's fine for small time outfits. The big barrier with paying for content isn't that I can't part with the change to read an article that piques my interest. It's that I don't want to hand over payment information to any random website. Both for security reasons and because it's a giant hassle. Fix that problem and you're good.
- mveew2 9y ago
  No free content, no buzzfeed / huffington post / breitbart garbage. Sounds good to me! If your content is so shitty that nobody would pay to view it, then it's worthless.
- larkeith 9y ago
  Twenty years of nearly ad-free internet prove this sentiment utterly inaccurate.
- tannhaeuser 9y ago
  To hell with "free" content if the price to pay is erosion of privacy or outright mass surveillance, concentration in the hands of very few, manipulative click- and flamebait and addictive consumption of digital media to the detriment of quality journalists/authors and other creatives.
- duckfruit 9y ago
  Free content, sure. But also ads for penile enhancements and dialog boxes that go "Congratulations! You've won $100,000 in Amazon gift cards! Click here quick [obvious phishing link] to claim your prize!". Scams, pure and simple. Not claiming that tracking prevention is going to solve these problems, but any move that at least attempts to reign in the worst excesses of a scummy industry is a step in the right direction IMHO. Anil Dash had a good thread about this recently, and he puts it much better than I: https://twitter.com/anildash/status/949476770922844161 https://twitter.com/anildash/status/949476770922844161
- nathanaldensr 9y ago
  I don't need to get ready; most content on the WWW is trash, anyway.
- brisance 9y ago
  Have you not experienced the internet in the 90s? There were little to no ads, content was free. Signal-to-noise ratio was through the roof.
  - username223 9y ago
    Ah, for the days when "internet celebrities" had day jobs... These days, sadly, they mostly just "productize content and brand engagement for maximum revenue stream conversion."

I think I speak for many when I say: "Cry me a river."

tootie 9y ago

No ad revenue, no free content. Get ready for paywalls everywhere.

JadeNB 9y ago
> No ad revenue, no free content. Get ready for paywalls everywhere. Well, paywalls lots of places. There'll be less incentive for clickfarming sites, and some-to-many-to-all of the big sites will probably go for-pay, but lots of smaller sites will still provide content because people like to communicate with the world. It doesn't sound like a bad thing to me—especially if we're being told that the trade-off is paying for content, versus giving up rights to our privacy.
chimmy_chonga 9y ago
They can still make money off ad revenue, they'll just have to think of a way to do it without compromising the user's privacy.
- wadkar 9y ago
  Good point, the ads could be content driven rather than user profile driven.
  - openasocket 9y ago
    I really really think this is the way to go. When I'm on programming websites I want ads from cloud providers, and when I'm wood working websites I want ads for belt sanders. I feel like it makes more sense to display ads that match up with the content of the web page anyway, it means the viewer might be in a more receptive mood for that type of product. Not to mention it avoids the entire issue of user privacy and the difficulty of tracking users. It's also how all advertising has been done since the beginning of time, and I don't see why the Internet has to be such a special case.
    - mark-r 9y ago
      The internet was a special case simply because it made it possible to do a better job of predicting your interests. At that point it became an arms race because you didn't want to spend on ads that were less effective than your competitor's. If we went back to content-based advertising those ad dollars wouldn't disappear, the distribution would just change.
  - ThorAndZeus 9y ago
    Very good point indeed. And that is how the publishing industry used to do with segmented magazines. Each publication built their own reader's profile and ad agencies would chose a publication over another based on who they would like to target. That is a much more ethical approach, in my opinion.
    - grigjd3 9y ago
      This still happens with online ads, but supply quality matters. Location of an ad, quality of the domain (ESPN is very good value). But roughly 100 junk auctions come in (no bidder) for every ok auction (single bid reduces to floor) and just a tenth of that represents a good location (bids drive the price above the floor). So yes, people still hit up espn's college football pages with truck ads and the Washington post got targeted for ads by the Bahraini embassy trying to drum up support during their spat with Saudi Arabia.
- JadeNB 9y ago
  > They can still make money off ad revenue, they'll just have to think of a way to do it without compromising the user's privacy. Look, let's not get drastic. Obviously the first step is to whine about it, and behave as if the user's respect for privacy is tantamount to theft. Ooh, maybe try getting some laws passed criminalising ad blocking! (I am not sure whether that is implausibly ridiculous or a simple description of facts.)
- ucaetano 9y ago
  Sure, but they would only make a fraction of what they make today, most creators would go out of business and most free services would be shut down.
  - nradov 9y ago
    That would be an acceptable outcome.
    - ucaetano 9y ago
      Reduced economic activity, increased unemployment and poverty is for you an acceptable outcome so that you personally don't have to see ads? Wow...
      - AlexandrB 9y ago
        > Reduced economic activity, increased unemployment and poverty "Won't someone PLEASE think of the children!!!!" There are already non-ad-supported funding alternatives for small creators (like Patreon). Maybe the loss of an ad-supported web would finally create sufficient interest in development of micropayment and microfunding services to help the rest. Edit: and maybe we can finally rid the web of clickbait and Taboola-style garbage content.
        ucaetano 9y ago
        It wouldn't work. Ads work because you're trading something that is worth more to the publisher than to you. Let's imagine a utility currency called bananas. A piece of your attention is worth 0 bananas to you. But it is worth 10 bananas to a publisher. The cost of creating and serving you a piece of content is 5 bananas to the publisher, and the value of it to you is 2 bananas. If there were no ads, you'd be willing to pay 2 bananas to the publisher, which would not cover the cost. Therefore, the publisher and content creators would go out of business. You wouldn't be willing to pay the full cost (5 bananas), because the content isn't worth that much to you. Outome: You: 0 bananas Publisher: 0 bananas By seeing the ad, you generate 10 bananas of value to the publisher and content creator, while you get 2 bananas of value by receiving the content. Outcome: You: 2 bananas Publisher: 10 bananas Direct funding will never fully replace ad revenue.
wadkar 9y ago
Will paywalls assure privacy? Will paying for content guarantee no tracking JavaScript (I’m looking at you Google Analytics). How many would be willing to pay for a simple non-js HTML that’s just plain content?
- lern_too_spel 9y ago
  With a paywall, the news site gets you to log in, which gives them a first party cookie and a way to track you cross-device that breaks ITP — if you pay for news, you likely read it every day. They're not going to overlook that additional source of income just because you pay them, just like print newspapers didn't keep ads out of subscribers' newspapers.
letsgetphysITal 9y ago
I'm fine with advertising; I see it every day on TV, in magazines, as I walk down the street. What the ad networks want, though, is pervasive, persistent, personally identifiable cross-domain tracking across the entire WWW. Obnoxious and unskippable autoplaying videos. Obnoxious, garish popups. 1/5 of the on screen real estate to be advertising often only loosely related to the content, more often than not totally disinteresting to the reader, and potentially serving up malware via their active content. No. Apple is doing the right thing, and the networks brought it on themselves. I have ZERO sympathy, and anyone who relies on their parasitic behaviour to exist doesn't really offer any value worth paying for anyway. I bet content becomes meaningful enough to be worth paying for, as the rest will die.
- clarkenheim 9y ago
  I don't necessarily think this is true. Advertisers want to be able to attribute revenue to the types of ads that they show, that way they can spend less money on advertising and focus it on the channels which actually work for them. Cookies are the best way of attributing online ads to online sales. TL;DR they want effective attribution, not to wreck your browsing experience.
  - jtbayly 9y ago
    Sure. They want effective attribution, because that leads to more effective ads. But they are also perfectly willing to do any and all of those other things to get "effective ads." Those other things mean that the next big data hack/leak won't be your SSN & DOB, but your SSN, DOB, and porn preference.
- geocar 9y ago
  > What the ad networks want... What advertisers want is a real, credible KPI. When it's television, and you can show evidence that 2m people watch this program, so sponsoring gets you 2m of your target audience (or whatever you want to argue). With online, there are few web pages that get 2m people to read them in a day... and surely there's some effect from all those other sites out there. Some of them are even niche, so they might be a hard audience to get... Ad networks offer "all those other sites", and since you can't verify that the 50 people who went to that web page aren't included in the 20 people who read that other web page without "cross-domain tracking" you can't piggy-back on that argument being made in Television. Then you've got the second-screen phenomenon: Few people had two televisions in the same room, but almost everyone has at least two screens. Did I get this part of my target audience on their phone or on the desktop. Choices are, buy everyone twice (halving the advertising budget), or be a little more efficient: Ad networks know what they'd prefer, so they want that tracking to personally identify you now. These ad networks are the ones convincing advertisers they need a super mega cookie to track everything. And so on.
oneeyedpigeon 9y ago
Quite aside from other arguments, there was plenty of free content before advertisers caught onto the www, and there's still quite a bit to be found.
jumpman500 9y ago
I would be happy to deal with more paywalls. Anytime there is an ad free version of an app I'll buy it. I've even started paying for most of the newspapers I regular. I think we could see a huge improvement in online content quality if people started paying for stuff they like with real money, rather than paying by being distracted by ads.
- epicide 9y ago
  Exactly. There is a huge jump in quality of content when you are trying to get users to pay for your work rather than just trying to just get enough people to click on it. It requires you to actually deliver on your promise. Sustained interaction and user satisfaction require more thought process than just slapping a clickbait title on something. In reality, clickbait titles work all too well. Will we lose some good businesses and content creators? Most definitely, but the good (and lucky) ones will adapt and it sets a MUCH better model for future creators.
romanovcode 9y ago
I rather pay for quality and then get free shit.
epicide 9y ago
I would rather have content creators competing for my money and my satisfaction rather than JUST my initial interest and attention.
ThorAndZeus 9y ago
I much rather pay (I already do) for quality, non-bullshit, level headed content than consume lots of meaningless articles that server as click bait.
scarface74 9y ago
I pay for Netflix, Hulu's ad free tier, and CBS's ad free tier. I would pay for content on the web I find compelling. But these days I get most of my content from podcasts. Their ads are more relevant, less intrusive and I can press a button on my headphones or in my car to do a 30 second skip. But usually I'll listen to an ad read by a new sponsor. It's a win-win. The cpm's for podcast are much better than for the web or even YouTube.
colmvp 9y ago
Fine by me. I pay for various subscriptions ranging from Spotify, to creators on Patreon, to streamers on Twitch.
pjmlp 9y ago
Fine by me, the guy at the newspaper stand doesn't give me the magazines and books for free.
ashark 9y ago
Considering we're in an unprecedented content boom, this would harm me not at all and might even help. The free content might go back to being good stuff from enthusiasts rather than SEO-gaming junk. Signal-to-noise might improve. Interoperable standards for services like messaging might start to matter again.
diffeomorphism 9y ago
Who suggested anything about "no ad revenue"? Currently invasive advertising is better payed. However, there is no reason to believe that prices will stay the same if all advertisers are forced to satisfy some reasonable privacy standards. That is what is being suggested, not abolishing all forms of advertisement.
syrrim 9y ago
You're on a free website that has no (explicit) ads right now.
- logfromblammo 9y ago
  Rather than pay someone else to rent their user-tracking advertising system, YC built a platform where their target audience comes to them--sometimes compulsively. The influencers and evangelists among us can then multiply awareness to different audiences on their own platforms. Whenever they want to advertise a YC business, they can just pin a story to the front page for a few hours. It's smart, subtle, seamlessly non-intrusive, and one of the better advertising experiences (relative to other ad-delivery systems), in my opinion. If you haven't noticed, you need to tune your detector a bit closer to the noise floor.
naravara 9y ago
>No ad revenue, no free content. Get ready for paywalls everywhere. I'm fine with that. Let the media get its money by providing content that I like and want to pay for instead of by trying to game social media clicks. Most of the "content" online is the reading equivalent of junk-food anyway. Besides, there is a version of an ad supported economy that is actually respectful towards your users. You just do sponsored posts and unobtrusive banners. That's fine for small time outfits. The big barrier with paying for content isn't that I can't part with the change to read an article that piques my interest. It's that I don't want to hand over payment information to any random website. Both for security reasons and because it's a giant hassle. Fix that problem and you're good.
mveew2 9y ago
No free content, no buzzfeed / huffington post / breitbart garbage. Sounds good to me! If your content is so shitty that nobody would pay to view it, then it's worthless.
larkeith 9y ago
Twenty years of nearly ad-free internet prove this sentiment utterly inaccurate.
tannhaeuser 9y ago
To hell with "free" content if the price to pay is erosion of privacy or outright mass surveillance, concentration in the hands of very few, manipulative click- and flamebait and addictive consumption of digital media to the detriment of quality journalists/authors and other creatives.
duckfruit 9y ago
Free content, sure. But also ads for penile enhancements and dialog boxes that go "Congratulations! You've won $100,000 in Amazon gift cards! Click here quick [obvious phishing link] to claim your prize!". Scams, pure and simple. Not claiming that tracking prevention is going to solve these problems, but any move that at least attempts to reign in the worst excesses of a scummy industry is a step in the right direction IMHO. Anil Dash had a good thread about this recently, and he puts it much better than I: https://twitter.com/anildash/status/949476770922844161 https://twitter.com/anildash/status/949476770922844161
nathanaldensr 9y ago
I don't need to get ready; most content on the WWW is trash, anyway.
brisance 9y ago
Have you not experienced the internet in the 90s? There were little to no ads, content was free. Signal-to-noise ratio was through the roof.
- username223 9y ago
  Ah, for the days when "internet celebrities" had day jobs... These days, sadly, they mostly just "productize content and brand engagement for maximum revenue stream conversion."