6 ms·

It does provide value though. As much as I hate it most people don't want to pay for shit. So here we are.

docbrown 7y ago
>most people don't want to pay for shit I’ve paid for news before and they still bloat their pages with ads to track me. It’s not a matter of people not wanting to pay. Customers are willing to pay for X and Y if and when it nets them a positive gain in their experience with a product. The problem is more about how these corporations are constantly making our experiences worse while also still tracking our every click.
- Quekid5 7y ago
  Yeah, I'd actually be happy to pay... and I do for LWN, for example. The problem is that publishers apparently(!) cannot properly distinguish between ad-driven revenue streams and good/loyal-customer revenue streams. (I don't know why this is even an issue, but here we are.) Do NOT serve ads to your loyal revenue stream. Even if you can't make ends meet, do NOT do it. That will piss them off to no end, and they're your most loyal readers; they'll leave and never come back.
  - hedora 7y ago
    I asked someone in ad tech why “pay to remove the ads” is unheard of. Think about it from the advertisers’ perspective: You have a user base with a bunch of people. The ones that paid you to remove ads are, at least on average, wealthier than those that don’t. They certainly have disposable income. In other words, the people that paid for a subscription are exactly the fraction of the audience the advertiser is paying for access to! Of course, this argument falls apart for per-user targeted ads when ad blockers are prevalent. However, it makes perfect sense for display ads that are targeted based on content, or audience demographics, such as traditional mass media: tv, radio and newspapers. In fact, the logic seems to extend to any website that is trying to charge an above-bottom-feeder premium for ad real estate.
deleted 7y ago
[deleted]
munk-a 7y ago
I strongly disagree. I used to work on a MUD, the monthly run costs for that MUD came to $60. The MUD was free for anyone to play on - it had a website and forums and a server application to connect to via telnet. The cost for this came out of the fact that someone, somewhere needed to keep some servers running, and we needed to keep DNS working, the name registered... all of these ended up requiring three dedicated boxes which we got at a long term discounted rate because we knew a guy in a server farm where we could park our boxes. Once upon a time it was a similar question if you wanted to run a hobbyist website, you needed a dedicated box somewhere or maybe to fork out 15/mo for some space on a shared host. Now-a-days that MUD could easily run on the smallest cloud instance you could find with one less server even for a total of 10/mo - if you want to run a blog and tell the world about your intense interest in widget manufacturing there are cheap ways to host it - if the content is standard enough you might even be able to cut down the price to 10-20/yr. It used to be that if you were so passionate about a topic you thought there needed to be a website about it then... you'd start it and host it yourself, it'd be an incidental cost that you'd just eat - then the mentality shifted to the assumption that your hosting of this thing should be profitable to you - you should get paid for maintaining such a site! That's the real problem, people expect other people to pay for shit that nobody would pay for - since no one steps up to the "so reasonable" 10/mo subscription then ads are injected to make up for the "loss". If your site isn't valuable enough to get subscribers that doesn't mean it shouldn't exist, it just means that you should put up a donation page and treat any money you get out as an unbelievably strong endorsement of your decision to fund the existence of your little corner of the internet.
- joshspankit 7y ago
  The rundown on your costs assume that the site or service remains “unpopular” (as in not used by the majority of internet users). Costs scale pretty high if one finds themselves running a high-traffic site.
  - munk-a 7y ago
    I am working under the (I think reasonable assumption) that if your thing actually manages to become popular then you can either share governance and costs with a committee of interested parties or actually justify a subscriber model - possibly semi-voluntary style like patreon.
Gracana 7y ago
People don't want to pay because most of the shit out there is shit. It's all supported by sensational headlines, controversial stories, fluff, and lies. If it all disappeared, we'd be left with things that exist because people care about it, things that are cheap to run, and things that are actually valuable enough to pay for. Can't be worse than the situation we have now, and you cut out a huge swath of parasites in the process.

>most people don't want to pay for shit I’ve paid for news before and they still bloat their pages with ads to track me. It’s not a matter of people not wanting to pay. Customers are willing to pay for X and Y if and when it nets them a positive gain in their experience with a product. The problem is more about how these corporations are constantly making our experiences worse while also still tracking our every click.

Quekid5 7y ago
Yeah, I'd actually be happy to pay... and I do for LWN, for example. The problem is that publishers apparently(!) cannot properly distinguish between ad-driven revenue streams and good/loyal-customer revenue streams. (I don't know why this is even an issue, but here we are.) Do NOT serve ads to your loyal revenue stream. Even if you can't make ends meet, do NOT do it. That will piss them off to no end, and they're your most loyal readers; they'll leave and never come back.
- hedora 7y ago
  I asked someone in ad tech why “pay to remove the ads” is unheard of. Think about it from the advertisers’ perspective: You have a user base with a bunch of people. The ones that paid you to remove ads are, at least on average, wealthier than those that don’t. They certainly have disposable income. In other words, the people that paid for a subscription are exactly the fraction of the audience the advertiser is paying for access to! Of course, this argument falls apart for per-user targeted ads when ad blockers are prevalent. However, it makes perfect sense for display ads that are targeted based on content, or audience demographics, such as traditional mass media: tv, radio and newspapers. In fact, the logic seems to extend to any website that is trying to charge an above-bottom-feeder premium for ad real estate.

deleted 7y ago

[deleted]

munk-a 7y ago

I strongly disagree. I used to work on a MUD, the monthly run costs for that MUD came to $60. The MUD was free for anyone to play on - it had a website and forums and a server application to connect to via telnet. The cost for this came out of the fact that someone, somewhere needed to keep some servers running, and we needed to keep DNS working, the name registered... all of these ended up requiring three dedicated boxes which we got at a long term discounted rate because we knew a guy in a server farm where we could park our boxes. Once upon a time it was a similar question if you wanted to run a hobbyist website, you needed a dedicated box somewhere or maybe to fork out 15/mo for some space on a shared host. Now-a-days that MUD could easily run on the smallest cloud instance you could find with one less server even for a total of 10/mo - if you want to run a blog and tell the world about your intense interest in widget manufacturing there are cheap ways to host it - if the content is standard enough you might even be able to cut down the price to 10-20/yr. It used to be that if you were so passionate about a topic you thought there needed to be a website about it then... you'd start it and host it yourself, it'd be an incidental cost that you'd just eat - then the mentality shifted to the assumption that your hosting of this thing should be profitable to you - you should get paid for maintaining such a site! That's the real problem, people expect other people to pay for shit that nobody would pay for - since no one steps up to the "so reasonable" 10/mo subscription then ads are injected to make up for the "loss". If your site isn't valuable enough to get subscribers that doesn't mean it shouldn't exist, it just means that you should put up a donation page and treat any money you get out as an unbelievably strong endorsement of your decision to fund the existence of your little corner of the internet.

joshspankit 7y ago
The rundown on your costs assume that the site or service remains “unpopular” (as in not used by the majority of internet users). Costs scale pretty high if one finds themselves running a high-traffic site.
- munk-a 7y ago
  I am working under the (I think reasonable assumption) that if your thing actually manages to become popular then you can either share governance and costs with a committee of interested parties or actually justify a subscriber model - possibly semi-voluntary style like patreon.

Gracana 7y ago

People don't want to pay because most of the shit out there is shit. It's all supported by sensational headlines, controversial stories, fluff, and lies. If it all disappeared, we'd be left with things that exist because people care about it, things that are cheap to run, and things that are actually valuable enough to pay for. Can't be worse than the situation we have now, and you cut out a huge swath of parasites in the process.