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The problem with these "many many ways" are that those that tend to work better also tend to be user hostile (subscriptions for things that have no reason to be

• npongratz 7y ago
  > Also as a programmer i'm not sure how i'd go about doing a live show :-P I see live coding happening all over Youtube and Twitch.
  • dragandj 7y ago
    How many tickets have you bought for live coding shows?
    • cameronbrown 7y ago
      Huh? Tickets are an outdated concept on internet platforms. Space is unlimited and advertising can sustain a channel just fine. Edit: Medium sized channel.
      • jfim 7y ago
        According to Quora [0], ad revenue from YouTube is about $1 per thousand views. I doubt that programming live streaming is mainstream enough to be sustainable from ads alone. [0] https://www.quora.com/How-much-does-YouTube-pay-per-1000-views-How-where-can-I-get-sponsor-to-have-enough-capital-from-nothing-and-be-a-successful-company https://www.quora.com/How-much-does-YouTube-pay-per-1000-vie...
        • cameronbrown 7y ago
          These metrics are totally inaccurate because different verticals pay different CPMs. Some can be much higher, but I've no idea how programming topics fares.
          • jfim 7y ago
            Even if it's 10x that, and one has 10k viewers, $100 is about one or two hours of work at a FAANG. And there's no health care coverage or free lunch for streamers.
            • cameronbrown 7y ago
              Bear in mind that most viewers will see multiple ads during the stream, so 10k viewers could be more like 30k impressions. Well I wasn't necessarily thinking this was being compared to a full time job, just that a channel could be self supporting, but there are ways to get close: A strong supplement to ads is direct donations/subscriptions. If you've ever seen a YouTube/Twitch chat, people send a LOT of money that way and get their message highlighted/usually responded to for their money. It's not uncommon to see mid-tier YouTubers make hundreds in one stream but its probably the exception and not the rule.
    • npongratz 7y ago
      It's not "tickets," but https://handmadehero.org/watch https://handmadehero.org/watch is live-streamed coding, funded through https://handmadehero.org/fund https://handmadehero.org/fund. I've found it educational and entertaining, and is an example of a programmer doing a "live show."
    • TheCoelacanth 7y ago
      Quite a few if you include such content being bundled together with other content into a conference.
• HNcantBtrustd 7y ago
  Well... I've seen a particularly aggressive company use their IP to kill competitors. You can't make a specific file format without using this company. It seems any free or low cost competitor gets bought by them. It's made the CAD world horrible.
• chongli 7y ago
  subscriptions for things that have no reason to be provided as a service instead of as a product), make the users the products themselves It seems to be working okay for YouTube and Twitch content creators. By monetizing via donations, Patreon patronage, and Twitch subscriptions, creators form a closer and more direct relationship with their audience. Twitch streamers especially are rewarded for engaging directly with people in chat. For programmers it's different. Your best bet is to get paid by a company to work on proprietary business software, which can be highly specialized to the company and protected by trade secrets.
  • rubinelli 7y ago
    Entertainment seems to be swinging back to being primarily a service business, after a relatively short period as a hit-driven product business. It's not uncommon to hear a fan talking about buying a product specifically to support the creator.
    • wolfgke 7y ago
      > It's not uncommon to hear a fan talking about buying a product specifically to support the creator. A consideration: Could a reason for this also be that people do want to avoid that their money goes to "evil media companies" who will use this money to fight against them (think DRM, think anti-consumer legislation etc.)?
    • Silhouette 7y ago
      It's not uncommon to hear a fan talking about buying a product specifically to support the creator. And that sentiment is great, but while it's not unusual, it's certainly not the view that most people take. If even 10% of the people who like our stuff on social media and enjoy using the free versions actually paid even for the cheapest one-off purchase or shortest subscription to support the creators, I'd be writing to you from great hall of my palace right now.
  • scarejunba 7y ago
    Trade secrets are protected only by intellectual property regimes, and we're talking about a world without intellectual property.
• rayiner 7y ago
  > At the end of the day the plain old "give me money to give you thing" works the best for all parties involved (assuming said parties want to be involved), despite any drawbacks. This is the heart of it for me. All the new monetization models developed in the last 20 years suck. I don't want software as a service, I don't want freemium, I certainly don't want to be the product for ad-supported software. All I want is to pay you for the thing and get the thing and then for you to leave me alone until you release a new version of the thing.
  • swiley 7y ago
    What about software maintenance as a service? Most of the decent software I’ve seen lately has used this model of monetization.
• pitaj 7y ago
  Patreon is a huge example of this model working very well in the online creator space. Music artists already make the majority of their income from live shows. The solution to "subscriptions for things that have no reason to be provided as a service instead of as a product" is just trusting that people will pay if they like your product, or creating alternatives in the open-source space. Which will be much easier if you can rightfully use prior work. Your other concerns already exist, so at the worst we just have what we already have. > Also as a programmer i'm not sure how i'd go about doing a live show :-P You may be surprised. Many programmers do live-coding sessions as they work on open source products.
  • Crinus 7y ago
    Yes, many programmers do live-coding sessions, but how many are making money doing it (and enough to live from that)?
    • Swizec 7y ago
      I do livecoding a lot. It’s a great way to build and audience, do branding, etc. You absolutely need to then do something to monetize said audience. Selling a course is the common model. But that’s selling access to information which is what we’re trying to argue against here. I have also been pleasantly surprised that you can sell access to a livecoding series. That’s sort of like tickets to a live show. Workshops are another form of a live programming show that people will pay money for. Have also done those and it’s a lot of fun. Most paid forms of these are in exchange for teaching. Access to intellectual property in your brain.
      • ghaff 7y ago
        >Workshops are another form of a live programming show that people will pay money for. I know there are training companies that charge. You also have workshops as part of paid conferences but I assume the vast bulk of those workshops are done for free by people being paid by their employer. And Meetups are usually free with the same people from companies along with those showing off or promoting some side project. I agree with your general point around teaching/training. It's just that you're competing with a lot of free content, often subsidized by some company's product sales.
• benj111 7y ago
  Would you say the current balance is correct? I don't think I'd go as far as the op, but the current arrangement is causing me to lose respect for the whole setup. IP should be there to enable people to make more stuff and no more. It seems that we should be testing how minimalistic we can make it, not how maximalistic, as is currently the case. The blurred lines case isnt going to result in more music being made, it's going to result in less, Marvin Gaye isnt going to make another album, because he's dead. I would guess for low overhead type things a 5 year copyright term wouldn't result in less music being produced, and it shouldn't be down to me to prove that, it should be down to whoever wants longer copyright terms to prove that that will result in more content being created.
• alexwennerberg 7y ago
  > The problem with these "many many ways" are that those that tend to work better also tend to be user hostile (subscriptions for things that have no reason to be provided as a service instead of as a product), make the users the products themselves (e.g. advertising), be privacy nightmares (like both the previous examples, at least for the majority of cases), etc. Public money and grants avoid all of these problems. In my view, we should dramatically expand public funding for technology and the arts, especially in a world where distribution is nearly free.
  • Silhouette 7y ago
    In my view, we should dramatically expand public funding for technology and the arts, especially in a world where distribution is nearly free. But then we need a way to decide what is or is not worthy of funding. The effect of copyright is to create a market-based approach to this, where something similar to the familiar economics of trading goods allows us to direct money to those who provide value. A move to publicly funded creative works would prompt the kind of debates we have today about public service broadcasters in particular and about pork barrel politics in general, but on a scale several orders of magnitude larger. I find it hard to imagine how that could possibly be as effective as what we have today. The power wielded by the gatekeepers of taxpayer-funded financial support would be immense and inevitably deeply corrosive.
• ben_w 7y ago
  > Also as a programmer i'm not sure how i'd go about doing a live show :-P I think the best-fit to the analogy here is when you make an app for one particular customer instead of for the general public.
  • Silhouette 7y ago
    But why would anyone then pay you to develop that app? They would need a business model of their own that doesn't rely on selling it, or maybe some other form of locked-down ecosystem where it is physically difficult to reproduce it even if it were legal to do so. If the app is just a way into some other paid-for service, that could work OK. It would be similar to businesses contributing to OSS that is available at no charge today because they build related services that they do charge for. But this sort of model only works for a subset of the valuable apps produced today.
    • ben_w 7y ago
      So, like websites? A surprising number of the apps I’ve worked on had websites with similar features. Don’t get me wrong, some things may be well suited to the current model: a hiking GPS needs good maps, good maps are expensive to make, that expense is currently recovered with copyright licenses… but even then the best maps seem to be from the government, e.g. Ordinance Survey in the UK, and that app development could easily be nationalised and funded from taxation the way all NASA’s output is.
• belorn 7y ago
  the plain old model has historically been full of exceptions in order to make it work. Copyright used to expire, you had libraries as an solution to written words and people could do public performance without asking for permission. Then in the last 30-40 years all those exceptions and escape vales for the plain old method of copyright was either made obsolete or amended away. Copyright does not expire in any meaningful way, public libraries holds only a marginal amount of all the copyrighted works, public performance got locked down, and so on. The old "give me money to give you thing" worked fined in the old times with old time copyright and society. It work crappy in current time with current copyright and current society. Thus people are rushing to find a new better way. As a programmer we could go back to 1790 old copyright law and still have a job. Even the game industry would survive fine on it.