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The biggest barrier is that people don't want to pay for content. This has been the subject of endless discussions over decades and just yesterday there was a l

The biggest barrier is that people don't want to pay for content. This has been the subject of endless discussions over decades and just yesterday there was a large HN conversation over too many video subscriptions causing people to turn to piracy again. Not to mention it negatively affects the vast majority of people who can't afford to pay for everything they consume. It's possible to enable advertising while maintaining privacy and security. What was missing was legal and regulatory forces to push advertisers and adtech into it. Now it's here.

d1zzy 7y ago
I would say it's a combination of: - convenience: do not underestimate it, lots of supporting evidence that people want maximum convenience. Notice how a small UI change as "one click purchase" increased Amazon sales significantly or why they even make/sell those buttons to put around the house to press and refill periodic stuff - access: like I was saying in another reply, it's simply the case that in a lot of situations, users (because of age, location and economic status) simply have no good means to pay electronically - affordability: 10 cent/view pay seem like nothing to us but in many places that can add up to a few USD per month that may be the cost of food of a family for a week. So now you'd have to do geographical location based pricing, dealing with all the crap that comes with it (people using proxies to avoid it, etc)
- manigandham 7y ago
  Convenience and access have been tried by several startups (including a project that we did a few years back). It's being attempted yet again by the Brave browser with blockchain tech. With micropayments, there's a big problem with decision fatigue. Affordability is the largest factor by far though because most people just cant pay for everything they consume for free today. When you look at video content especially, it can easily add up to several dollars per day in spend.
- mirimir 7y ago
  > - convenience ... Just run something like a Radius server, which any website could query, and which could log usage. > access: ... Provide a wide variety of payment options. As many VPN services and VPS hosts do. > - affordability: ... I don't know specifics, but I can't imagine how users in places so poor generate the same ad income as users in wealthier places. So just adjust cost/view to generate the same income that the current system does.
TACIXAT 7y ago
Users don't want to pay a 5$ / month subscription for content. I know I don't. Would they be willing to pay cents or even fractions of a cent for content? I'd like to see a study on that. We need the infrastructure to support that model though, which I think doesn't fully exist yet.
Terretta 7y ago
> people don’t want to pay for content Most “content” isn’t worth paying for. Google’s phrasing about publishers not being able to pay to generate content made me think, “Yay, no content mills!” Separately, people with something to say like to reach audiences. In the distant past, it was called “pamphleteering”. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pamphleteer https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pamphleteer There was a web before banner ads. The content came from somewhere...
- manigandham 7y ago
  There was advertising before banner ads too, so is your issue about ads on the internet? That was a tiny web that barely anyone used and even less created for. It's really not the same. Also you don't have the same needs and wants as the billions of other people who spend time online to make a judgement that most content isn't worth paying for.
  - Terretta 7y ago
    > There was advertising before banner ads too, so is your issue about ads on the internet? This thread is about your grandparent comment, ”The biggest barrier is that people don’t want to pay for content.” Billions of people are the market, your remark opens with the judgment that people don’t want to pay for content. In other words, the market has judged most content isn’t worth paying for. > That was a tiny web that barely anyone used and even less created for. It's really not the same. On the contrary, today, certainly a higher number have their words preserved online, as persistent conversations such as this one or perhaps Likes on Instagram. But a far lower percentage of those who are online today “have a home page” for example. In the mid to late 90s a higher proportion of “web pages” were meaningful, and a much higher percentage of users were also publishers of their own web sites. Amateur web sites unofficially organized around topics of interest were a thing: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring That content is still getting created, and still getting self-published, it’s just much harder to find. Self-published home pages like this are still cool: https://www.gwern.net/ https://www.gwern.net/ This one uses a kind of ethical advertising: https://slatestarcodex.com/about/ https://slatestarcodex.com/about/ Note the author invites patronage but says don’t worry about it: ”I have a day job and SSC gets free hosting, so don't feel pressured to contribute. But extra cash helps pay for contest prizes, meetup expenses, and me spending extra time blogging instead of working.” People with things to say will say them. While it’s still being experimented with, it seems that quality content is worth paying for, even worth patronage: https://patrons.theguardian.com/ https://patrons.theguardian.com/ This goes into more detail about content mill versus patronage model for higher value content: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/its-time-to-democratize-p_b_4298310 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/its-time-to-democratize-p_b_4... // Irony of HuffPo well noted.
neilv 7y ago
> The biggest barrier is that people don't want to pay for content. Tons of people paid for content before the Web. Newspapers, magazines, books, CDs, DVDs, cable TV, premium channels. With the Web, dotcoms were focused on IPOs (and so the appearance of possibly being a player in the future), everyone was focused on adoption, there was also a lot of finance opportunism. Then most all of the the business models switched to spying/control, or just more finance scams. For which free content still makes sense. If you end the spying/control business model, and the current growth-oriented investment schemes, and maybe breakup a few megacorps that never should've been allowed to happen... then maybe we'll get better options for low-friction content payment, and presumably some people will resume paying for content with value. Also, the US piracy culture needs to stop. One of the reasons that's been hard to argue, starting in the MP3 days, is that some of the most directly affected content organizations (e.g., MPAA, RIAA) had awful reputations. But to the extent that piracy culture affects legitimate economic sustainability for other content (e.g., subreddits that institutionalized pasting news article full text, or rehosting webcomics on imgur), we need to fix the culture, and make it not socially-acceptable.
- tsimionescu 7y ago
  > Tons of people paid for content before the Web. Newspapers, magazines, books, CDs, DVDs, cable TV, premium channels. Sure, but newspapers, magazines, cable TV and premium channels have never really lived off of customer payments, they were always ad-based businesses first (there are exceptions, such as small newspapers and HBO).
  - foobarqwertz 7y ago
    Exactly. There are tons of good old paper magazines just created cause the target audience, thus ad targeting, is relatively easy to predict.
  - neilv 7y ago
    Digital technology changes some of the economics, and perhaps some of the need for advertising revenue. For example, you could sell mostly journalism "content", without the expense of printing and distribution operation.
colordrops 7y ago
Most content is either just plain bad or manipulative. We should welcome the death of most content. Content makers that do it for the love of it rather than the monetary reward typically make much better content.
joes223 7y ago
The biggest barrier is that there is no money in honest business. In other words, people want to pay for useful content (e.g. wikipedia is still up and running), it's just what they want to pay is nowhere near multi-billion-dollar valuation that VCs are used to. Can Google Search, Maps, YouTube, Chrome, Android and so on exist without ads and tracking? Absolutely. It's just this business would become non-profit.
- manigandham 7y ago
  I'm not sure what you mean by "honest business" or what any of this has to do with non-profits. Nothing is free. You either pay with cash that you earn, or you pay with your attention with ads. Option 2 is faster, easier, more passive, more affordable and more equal. That's why billions of people prefer to monetize attention on-demand for their content instead of paying cash upfront.
  - 2019-08-24 7y ago
    He is arguing that Google could make money with cash, only less than what they currently make with ads, because people spend cash cautiously, whereas they spend data wildly.
    - manigandham 7y ago
      None of that has to do with being non-profit. Google is a trillion dollar company. Yes it can make less profits and still survive. Whether people would pay enough to get anywhere near the costs however, is probably unlikely given how little they pay for far cheaper content on the internet today. Wikipedia is not comparable since the vast majority is unpaid volunteer work and user-provided content.
  - joes223 7y ago
    There is nothing more equal in it. It's outright criminal. The today's adtech is when you walk into a grocery store, get stuff for free, while in the meantime the store takes notes what car you drive, who you likely are, packages all this info and sells to whoever pays, including criminals.
KptMarchewa 7y ago
Yet services like Netflix and Spotify thrive. Why? Because they are 1) easier to use than piracy "competitors" 2) they offer a fair deal without seemingly fleecing you, like paying for individual articles.
- manigandham 7y ago
  In my comment, I described how piracy is coming back because of too many subscription services. It certainly isn't as simple as just being easier to use, and there are issues with what people will pay for regardless of billing model. Spotify is barely thriving and took 13 years to make its first profit. It's precariously balanced with constant problems in artist payouts and catalogs. Netflix managed to grow by getting into the content production business but is seeing challenges there as costs rise. And both Netflix and Spotify distribute content that can be consumed multiple times. How many times are you going to read the same article? If the answer was as simple as an HN comment, the industry would've figured it out by now.

d1zzy 7y ago

I would say it's a combination of: - convenience: do not underestimate it, lots of supporting evidence that people want maximum convenience. Notice how a small UI change as "one click purchase" increased Amazon sales significantly or why they even make/sell those buttons to put around the house to press and refill periodic stuff - access: like I was saying in another reply, it's simply the case that in a lot of situations, users (because of age, location and economic status) simply have no good means to pay electronically - affordability: 10 cent/view pay seem like nothing to us but in many places that can add up to a few USD per month that may be the cost of food of a family for a week. So now you'd have to do geographical location based pricing, dealing with all the crap that comes with it (people using proxies to avoid it, etc)

manigandham 7y ago
Convenience and access have been tried by several startups (including a project that we did a few years back). It's being attempted yet again by the Brave browser with blockchain tech. With micropayments, there's a big problem with decision fatigue. Affordability is the largest factor by far though because most people just cant pay for everything they consume for free today. When you look at video content especially, it can easily add up to several dollars per day in spend.
mirimir 7y ago
> - convenience ... Just run something like a Radius server, which any website could query, and which could log usage. > access: ... Provide a wide variety of payment options. As many VPN services and VPS hosts do. > - affordability: ... I don't know specifics, but I can't imagine how users in places so poor generate the same ad income as users in wealthier places. So just adjust cost/view to generate the same income that the current system does.

TACIXAT 7y ago

Users don't want to pay a 5$ / month subscription for content. I know I don't. Would they be willing to pay cents or even fractions of a cent for content? I'd like to see a study on that. We need the infrastructure to support that model though, which I think doesn't fully exist yet.

Terretta 7y ago

> people don’t want to pay for content Most “content” isn’t worth paying for. Google’s phrasing about publishers not being able to pay to generate content made me think, “Yay, no content mills!” Separately, people with something to say like to reach audiences. In the distant past, it was called “pamphleteering”. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pamphleteer https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pamphleteer There was a web before banner ads. The content came from somewhere...

manigandham 7y ago
There was advertising before banner ads too, so is your issue about ads on the internet? That was a tiny web that barely anyone used and even less created for. It's really not the same. Also you don't have the same needs and wants as the billions of other people who spend time online to make a judgement that most content isn't worth paying for.
- Terretta 7y ago
  > There was advertising before banner ads too, so is your issue about ads on the internet? This thread is about your grandparent comment, ”The biggest barrier is that people don’t want to pay for content.” Billions of people are the market, your remark opens with the judgment that people don’t want to pay for content. In other words, the market has judged most content isn’t worth paying for. > That was a tiny web that barely anyone used and even less created for. It's really not the same. On the contrary, today, certainly a higher number have their words preserved online, as persistent conversations such as this one or perhaps Likes on Instagram. But a far lower percentage of those who are online today “have a home page” for example. In the mid to late 90s a higher proportion of “web pages” were meaningful, and a much higher percentage of users were also publishers of their own web sites. Amateur web sites unofficially organized around topics of interest were a thing: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Webring That content is still getting created, and still getting self-published, it’s just much harder to find. Self-published home pages like this are still cool: https://www.gwern.net/ https://www.gwern.net/ This one uses a kind of ethical advertising: https://slatestarcodex.com/about/ https://slatestarcodex.com/about/ Note the author invites patronage but says don’t worry about it: ”I have a day job and SSC gets free hosting, so don't feel pressured to contribute. But extra cash helps pay for contest prizes, meetup expenses, and me spending extra time blogging instead of working.” People with things to say will say them. While it’s still being experimented with, it seems that quality content is worth paying for, even worth patronage: https://patrons.theguardian.com/ https://patrons.theguardian.com/ This goes into more detail about content mill versus patronage model for higher value content: https://www.huffpost.com/entry/its-time-to-democratize-p_b_4298310 https://www.huffpost.com/entry/its-time-to-democratize-p_b_4... // Irony of HuffPo well noted.

neilv 7y ago

> The biggest barrier is that people don't want to pay for content. Tons of people paid for content before the Web. Newspapers, magazines, books, CDs, DVDs, cable TV, premium channels. With the Web, dotcoms were focused on IPOs (and so the appearance of possibly being a player in the future), everyone was focused on adoption, there was also a lot of finance opportunism. Then most all of the the business models switched to spying/control, or just more finance scams. For which free content still makes sense. If you end the spying/control business model, and the current growth-oriented investment schemes, and maybe breakup a few megacorps that never should've been allowed to happen... then maybe we'll get better options for low-friction content payment, and presumably some people will resume paying for content with value. Also, the US piracy culture needs to stop. One of the reasons that's been hard to argue, starting in the MP3 days, is that some of the most directly affected content organizations (e.g., MPAA, RIAA) had awful reputations. But to the extent that piracy culture affects legitimate economic sustainability for other content (e.g., subreddits that institutionalized pasting news article full text, or rehosting webcomics on imgur), we need to fix the culture, and make it not socially-acceptable.

tsimionescu 7y ago
> Tons of people paid for content before the Web. Newspapers, magazines, books, CDs, DVDs, cable TV, premium channels. Sure, but newspapers, magazines, cable TV and premium channels have never really lived off of customer payments, they were always ad-based businesses first (there are exceptions, such as small newspapers and HBO).
- foobarqwertz 7y ago
  Exactly. There are tons of good old paper magazines just created cause the target audience, thus ad targeting, is relatively easy to predict.
- neilv 7y ago
  Digital technology changes some of the economics, and perhaps some of the need for advertising revenue. For example, you could sell mostly journalism "content", without the expense of printing and distribution operation.

colordrops 7y ago

Most content is either just plain bad or manipulative. We should welcome the death of most content. Content makers that do it for the love of it rather than the monetary reward typically make much better content.

joes223 7y ago

The biggest barrier is that there is no money in honest business. In other words, people want to pay for useful content (e.g. wikipedia is still up and running), it's just what they want to pay is nowhere near multi-billion-dollar valuation that VCs are used to. Can Google Search, Maps, YouTube, Chrome, Android and so on exist without ads and tracking? Absolutely. It's just this business would become non-profit.

manigandham 7y ago
I'm not sure what you mean by "honest business" or what any of this has to do with non-profits. Nothing is free. You either pay with cash that you earn, or you pay with your attention with ads. Option 2 is faster, easier, more passive, more affordable and more equal. That's why billions of people prefer to monetize attention on-demand for their content instead of paying cash upfront.
- 2019-08-24 7y ago
  He is arguing that Google could make money with cash, only less than what they currently make with ads, because people spend cash cautiously, whereas they spend data wildly.
  - manigandham 7y ago
    None of that has to do with being non-profit. Google is a trillion dollar company. Yes it can make less profits and still survive. Whether people would pay enough to get anywhere near the costs however, is probably unlikely given how little they pay for far cheaper content on the internet today. Wikipedia is not comparable since the vast majority is unpaid volunteer work and user-provided content.
- joes223 7y ago
  There is nothing more equal in it. It's outright criminal. The today's adtech is when you walk into a grocery store, get stuff for free, while in the meantime the store takes notes what car you drive, who you likely are, packages all this info and sells to whoever pays, including criminals.

KptMarchewa 7y ago

Yet services like Netflix and Spotify thrive. Why? Because they are 1) easier to use than piracy "competitors" 2) they offer a fair deal without seemingly fleecing you, like paying for individual articles.

manigandham 7y ago
In my comment, I described how piracy is coming back because of too many subscription services. It certainly isn't as simple as just being easier to use, and there are issues with what people will pay for regardless of billing model. Spotify is barely thriving and took 13 years to make its first profit. It's precariously balanced with constant problems in artist payouts and catalogs. Netflix managed to grow by getting into the content production business but is seeing challenges there as costs rise. And both Netflix and Spotify distribute content that can be consumed multiple times. How many times are you going to read the same article? If the answer was as simple as an HN comment, the industry would've figured it out by now.