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> I try to avoid advertising as much as possible, and it's sad that they are one more place it's invading. It's unfortunate that internet people have been fals

> I try to avoid advertising as much as possible, and it's sad that they are one more place it's invading. It's unfortunate that internet people have been falsely conditioned to believe the people who create the media we consume shouldn't be paid. Oh, but you will gladly pay for quality, ad-free content, you say? Unfortunately, based on the numbers I've seen at media companies I've freelanced for, this only works out for a tiny minority of creators. Unless you are the NYT (housing 1000+ journalists) or Ben Thompson (an outlier with a super high income audience), the number of listeners/readers/etc willing to pay is astonishingly low. When people say they will pay in surveys, most of them are flat out lying. Here's a recent example: https://tim.blog/2019/07/11/why-im-stopping-the-fan-supported-podcast-experiment/ https://tim.blog/2019/07/11/why-im-stopping-the-fan-supporte... It turns out, a vast majority of people who complain about ads will not put their money where their mouth is. I say bravo to NPR for looking out for the sustainability of their excellent work. I happily listen to ads to sustain their content. I have full confidence they will continue to report with the same independence they've always had.

Alex3917 7y ago
> It's unfortunate that internet people have been falsely conditioned to believe the people who create the media we consume shouldn't be paid. I mean if I happily give away all my blog posts for free under creative commons, why is it unreasonable to expect most other people to do the same? People who derive value from the Internet should just create one or two things per year to give back, whether that's a blog post, an app or website, open source software, or something else. I do think there is a need for a small percentage of people to create content full time. But at the same time right now there is also a huge oversupply of content, and we'd probably all be better off if 95% of it went away.
ahmedalsudani 7y ago
Your parent comment said nothing about paying in order to avoid ads and made no assumptions about any of the points you responded to. It was just lamenting ads.
- pembrook 7y ago
  And I was lamenting people who lament ads.
nitrogen 7y ago
> I try to avoid advertising as much as possible, and it's sad that they are one more place it's invading. It's unfortunate that internet people have been falsely conditioned to believe the people who create the media we consume shouldn't be paid. Wow. I am actually amazed at the disingenuousness of that twisted interpretation of what you quoted. People will pay for what they value. The value of media has been utterly destroyed by ads. Ads are the problem.
- pembrook 7y ago
  Show me a single study proving that "ads" are the reason consumers won't pay for journalism anymore and I will 100% change my opinion.
  - boomboomsubban 7y ago
    The entire point of ads is to lower the price and increase circulation. It's not a consumer driven decision.
  - nitrogen 7y ago
    Why is this something that needs a "study"? You can make corporate-funded user research come to any conclusion you want. It's obvious on the face of it that the more you rely on ads the more ads control the content and eventually become the content. No company funded by ads is going to publish a study saying people don't like ads.
  - SomeOldThrow 7y ago
    Consumers will pay. The funding of newspapers is a major factor of why current journalism isn’t worth paying for: clickbait headlines, access journalism, slideshow content, listicles, opinion sections. There’s plenty of ad-independent journalism out there if you look that successfully funds itself through donations or memberships.
  - acollins1331 7y ago
    Yeah so social studies based on internet polls aren't science (see parents) and making decisions or drawing conclusions from them is probably worse than going off anecdotal evidence, because at least you aren't confident in how right you are when going that route.
cortesoft 7y ago
I think they are arguing for NPR to get more funding from the government, in the form of taxes. That is how public radio was traditionally funded.
SomeOldThrow 7y ago
> It's unfortunate that internet people have been falsely conditioned to believe the people who create the media we consume shouldn't be paid. Don’t get paid, not shouldn’t. The issue isn’t the reader’s lack of willingness to pay here lol.
ncallaway 7y ago
The blog post you linked appears to, in many ways, strongly undermine your argument. You say (when linking to the blog post) > When people say they will pay in surveys, most of them are flat out lying. Here's a recent example: What the blog post says is that actually, the pre-launch survey closely aligned with the outcome: > The really comical part is that I should have known, and I could have known. Actually, one could argue that I did know. > Pre-launch polling on social media almost perfectly predicted the outcome. Here’s the tweet I used to test the waters, which had nearly 18,000 respondents. The results were: > 72% – No, I wouldn’t donate. > 24% – I would give $5 per month. > 4% – I would give $10 or more per month. > The comments on this post are really worth reading. The feedback was almost entirely positive towards ads and almost entirely “meh” about fan-supported. In other words, the answer to my question was clear from the outset: 99% of my listeners are totally OK with ads, and many of them look forward to finding new products and services through my sponsor reads. The blog post's conclusion very much appears to be that—in hindsight—people were honest from the outset!
- pembrook 7y ago
  My point on Tim's post was that a majority of his most passionate followers (people who also follow him on twitter and would take the time to answer a survey) would not pay for his content. I have no doubt the 72% contains some overlap with "people who complain about ads." On the lying about willingness to pay reference, I was referring to actual data I've seen, which I posted below. This was from a media company I worked at (reposted here for context): 1) we surveyed users willingness to pay for a premium, ad-free content product 2) 32% said they would pay $1 or more per month 3) we launched said product 4) under 4% converted at $1 per month
  - slg 7y ago
    It depends what metric you are targeting. Some people create podcasts as an avenue to promote themselves, their projects, or their business. Tim Ferriss is one of those people. Other people create podcasts as their primary way to make a living. It doesn't make sense to put your podcasts behind a paywall if you are in the first group because the primary metric you care about is total listeners. However if you are in the second group a paywall might make sense since you probably don't care much about total listeners or conversion rates. The metric you care about is money and it doesn't take more than a couple thousand listeners before you can pull in a livable wage from listener supported podcasts. Just check out some of the numbers for podcasts on Patreon [1]. [1] - https://graphtreon.com/patreon-creators/podcasts https://graphtreon.com/patreon-creators/podcasts
Dylan16807 7y ago
> It turns out, a vast majority of people who complain about ads will not put their money where their mouth is. Not quite. If the baseline is that ads can provide enough revenue, and you're specifically paying to remove the ads, then that's a much smaller number. He has what, two ad slots, repeated at start and end? If that's $30 CPM at two per week, that's 26 cents a month. The minimum subscription was $9.95 a month. As somewhat of a tangent, I would like a way to pay $5 a month in a single spot and have it be apportioned to all the podcasts I listened to in that time, but that doesn't really exist as a service. Even though that's much more money than my listens are worth in ad revenue.
- mgkimsal 7y ago
  I'd think the apple news+ service they've started might end up being something that can go in that direction. Patreon as well, or even Spotify. I've started listening to podcasts via Spotify as the player has more fine-grained speed controls. I'm sure they could track my listens to that. letting podcast creators sign up to get paid a portion of listens would be useful, and something I'd support (maybe a $12/month price point vs $10? and split the $2 among the episodes I listen to?)
- NickNameNick 7y ago
  I think your tangent is describing youtube red. Assuming all your favorite podcasts are also on youtube.
  - Dylan16807 7y ago
    Yeah, if they were on youtube. Youtube red is a good model, and there's a reason I've complained in the past about how the very broken 'google contributor' should just copy it.
donkeyd 7y ago
> It's unfortunate that internet people have been falsely conditioned to believe the people who create the media we consume shouldn't be paid. I don't think this is true at all. Nobody thinks musicians shouldn't be paid, but until Spotify everyone was downloading music. > Oh, but you will gladly pay for quality, ad-free content, you say? I would definitely pay. I just don't want to pay for every single article I read by having going through a signup flow. Usually I can't even pay for a single article because you need to get a subscription. I would easily pay €10+ a month for a place where I can read all the articles I want from all the publishers I'm interested in. However, like in the video business, this doesn't seem feasible. So you end up with multiple subscriptions just to get the 1 piece of content a month that you want to consume from either of them.
- paulcole 7y ago
  > Nobody thinks musicians shouldn't be paid, but until Spotify everyone was downloading music. This is even worse IMO. People think musicians deserve to be paid but still manage to rationalize taking from them without paying instead.
  - wasdfff 7y ago
    Nothing wrong with buying merch and concert tickets while pirating the discography. Fuck the record label.
    - paulcole 7y ago
      Yeah there is. Taking something you shouldn't is by almost any definition wrong. Except when it comes to music and movies apparently.
      - SomeOldThrow 7y ago
        Grandpa’s property rights have no weight in the digital era. If you’re going to make something free to copy the last thing you should do is get mad when people copy it. What’s the point? Just charge people to watch.
afiori 7y ago
This remind me of when steam tried to monetize mods and the ensuing outrage forgot to mention that some of the biggest modders (as is most popular skyrim mods) receive less than 100$ for years of work in donations.
scumbert 7y ago
> It turns out, a vast majority of people who complain about ads will not put their money where their mouth is. No matter how many times this pans out, people try and convince themselves all netizens are altruistic, with the means to bankroll content creators. That just doesn't measure up to reality.
Chathamization 7y ago
> It's unfortunate that internet people have been falsely conditioned to believe the people who create the media we consume shouldn't be paid. Most of the media we consume is probably detrimental to us, even before advertising is factored in. It's not a bad thing when people have to make a choice in whether or not something is worth the money, and end up deciding it's not. It seems like people are better able to understand monetary costs than time or brain space costs. As an aside, some of the highest quality content I've found is free and without advertisements (for example, the Ottoman History Podcast or the Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean Podcast).
- vorpalhex 7y ago
  I've felt Dan Carlin (Hardcore History) has always had a very fair approach - the latest episodes are available and free with no advertisements. If you want the back catalog in it's entirety, it's a single lump sum of $50.
hrktb 7y ago
Wouldn't Patreon's success be a counterpoint ? The vast majority of people don't pay, but there seem to be enough people paying that it at least balances the ad dependency of a number of creators. I might be biased, but most of the content I really didn't want to go away or bend backward to get sponsors seem to have successful followings (99pi, the whole radiotopia rooster, Hello Internet, CGP Grey, a few minor ones like rebuild.fm) I think more and more the creative process could start by kickstarting the project and gauge how much of a public there is willing to pay for it, before going full steam ahead.
- SomeOldThrow 7y ago
  None if the podcasts I listen to have ads. I listen to about 15 distinct podcasts. There’s clearly a market.
bogomipz 7y ago
>"It's unfortunate that internet people have been falsely conditioned to believe the people who create the media we consume shouldn't be paid." Nowhere did I see in the OPs post that they believe people who create content shouldn't be paid. NPR is a publicly funded non profit which also gets revenues from corporate sponsors, endowments and foundations[1] and this model has served them and their listeners well. The OPs concerns as I understand it is one that is grounded in the excitement surrounding this new windfall of ad revenue from podcasts and it's possible effects on an organization that proudly proclaims their independence. Lastly aside from a couple of programs(All Things Considered and Morning Edition) NPR is not a content creator. They purchase content from PRI, WNYC Studios, and American Public Media. They are more of distributor and reseller of content. [1] https://www.npr.org/about-npr/178660742/public-radio-finances https://www.npr.org/about-npr/178660742/public-radio-finance...

Alex3917 7y ago

> It's unfortunate that internet people have been falsely conditioned to believe the people who create the media we consume shouldn't be paid. I mean if I happily give away all my blog posts for free under creative commons, why is it unreasonable to expect most other people to do the same? People who derive value from the Internet should just create one or two things per year to give back, whether that's a blog post, an app or website, open source software, or something else. I do think there is a need for a small percentage of people to create content full time. But at the same time right now there is also a huge oversupply of content, and we'd probably all be better off if 95% of it went away.

ahmedalsudani 7y ago

Your parent comment said nothing about paying in order to avoid ads and made no assumptions about any of the points you responded to. It was just lamenting ads.

pembrook 7y ago
And I was lamenting people who lament ads.

nitrogen 7y ago

> I try to avoid advertising as much as possible, and it's sad that they are one more place it's invading. It's unfortunate that internet people have been falsely conditioned to believe the people who create the media we consume shouldn't be paid. Wow. I am actually amazed at the disingenuousness of that twisted interpretation of what you quoted. People will pay for what they value. The value of media has been utterly destroyed by ads. Ads are the problem.

pembrook 7y ago
Show me a single study proving that "ads" are the reason consumers won't pay for journalism anymore and I will 100% change my opinion.
- boomboomsubban 7y ago
  The entire point of ads is to lower the price and increase circulation. It's not a consumer driven decision.
- nitrogen 7y ago
  Why is this something that needs a "study"? You can make corporate-funded user research come to any conclusion you want. It's obvious on the face of it that the more you rely on ads the more ads control the content and eventually become the content. No company funded by ads is going to publish a study saying people don't like ads.
- SomeOldThrow 7y ago
  Consumers will pay. The funding of newspapers is a major factor of why current journalism isn’t worth paying for: clickbait headlines, access journalism, slideshow content, listicles, opinion sections. There’s plenty of ad-independent journalism out there if you look that successfully funds itself through donations or memberships.
- acollins1331 7y ago
  Yeah so social studies based on internet polls aren't science (see parents) and making decisions or drawing conclusions from them is probably worse than going off anecdotal evidence, because at least you aren't confident in how right you are when going that route.

cortesoft 7y ago

I think they are arguing for NPR to get more funding from the government, in the form of taxes. That is how public radio was traditionally funded.

SomeOldThrow 7y ago

> It's unfortunate that internet people have been falsely conditioned to believe the people who create the media we consume shouldn't be paid. Don’t get paid, not shouldn’t. The issue isn’t the reader’s lack of willingness to pay here lol.

ncallaway 7y ago

The blog post you linked appears to, in many ways, strongly undermine your argument. You say (when linking to the blog post) > When people say they will pay in surveys, most of them are flat out lying. Here's a recent example: What the blog post says is that actually, the pre-launch survey closely aligned with the outcome: > The really comical part is that I should have known, and I could have known. Actually, one could argue that I did know. > Pre-launch polling on social media almost perfectly predicted the outcome. Here’s the tweet I used to test the waters, which had nearly 18,000 respondents. The results were: > 72% – No, I wouldn’t donate. > 24% – I would give $5 per month. > 4% – I would give $10 or more per month. > The comments on this post are really worth reading. The feedback was almost entirely positive towards ads and almost entirely “meh” about fan-supported. In other words, the answer to my question was clear from the outset: 99% of my listeners are totally OK with ads, and many of them look forward to finding new products and services through my sponsor reads. The blog post's conclusion very much appears to be that—in hindsight—people were honest from the outset!

pembrook 7y ago
My point on Tim's post was that a majority of his most passionate followers (people who also follow him on twitter and would take the time to answer a survey) would not pay for his content. I have no doubt the 72% contains some overlap with "people who complain about ads." On the lying about willingness to pay reference, I was referring to actual data I've seen, which I posted below. This was from a media company I worked at (reposted here for context): 1) we surveyed users willingness to pay for a premium, ad-free content product 2) 32% said they would pay $1 or more per month 3) we launched said product 4) under 4% converted at $1 per month
- slg 7y ago
  It depends what metric you are targeting. Some people create podcasts as an avenue to promote themselves, their projects, or their business. Tim Ferriss is one of those people. Other people create podcasts as their primary way to make a living. It doesn't make sense to put your podcasts behind a paywall if you are in the first group because the primary metric you care about is total listeners. However if you are in the second group a paywall might make sense since you probably don't care much about total listeners or conversion rates. The metric you care about is money and it doesn't take more than a couple thousand listeners before you can pull in a livable wage from listener supported podcasts. Just check out some of the numbers for podcasts on Patreon [1]. [1] - https://graphtreon.com/patreon-creators/podcasts https://graphtreon.com/patreon-creators/podcasts

Dylan16807 7y ago

> It turns out, a vast majority of people who complain about ads will not put their money where their mouth is. Not quite. If the baseline is that ads can provide enough revenue, and you're specifically paying to remove the ads, then that's a much smaller number. He has what, two ad slots, repeated at start and end? If that's $30 CPM at two per week, that's 26 cents a month. The minimum subscription was $9.95 a month. As somewhat of a tangent, I would like a way to pay $5 a month in a single spot and have it be apportioned to all the podcasts I listened to in that time, but that doesn't really exist as a service. Even though that's much more money than my listens are worth in ad revenue.

mgkimsal 7y ago
I'd think the apple news+ service they've started might end up being something that can go in that direction. Patreon as well, or even Spotify. I've started listening to podcasts via Spotify as the player has more fine-grained speed controls. I'm sure they could track my listens to that. letting podcast creators sign up to get paid a portion of listens would be useful, and something I'd support (maybe a $12/month price point vs $10? and split the $2 among the episodes I listen to?)
NickNameNick 7y ago
I think your tangent is describing youtube red. Assuming all your favorite podcasts are also on youtube.
- Dylan16807 7y ago
  Yeah, if they were on youtube. Youtube red is a good model, and there's a reason I've complained in the past about how the very broken 'google contributor' should just copy it.

donkeyd 7y ago

> It's unfortunate that internet people have been falsely conditioned to believe the people who create the media we consume shouldn't be paid. I don't think this is true at all. Nobody thinks musicians shouldn't be paid, but until Spotify everyone was downloading music. > Oh, but you will gladly pay for quality, ad-free content, you say? I would definitely pay. I just don't want to pay for every single article I read by having going through a signup flow. Usually I can't even pay for a single article because you need to get a subscription. I would easily pay €10+ a month for a place where I can read all the articles I want from all the publishers I'm interested in. However, like in the video business, this doesn't seem feasible. So you end up with multiple subscriptions just to get the 1 piece of content a month that you want to consume from either of them.

paulcole 7y ago
> Nobody thinks musicians shouldn't be paid, but until Spotify everyone was downloading music. This is even worse IMO. People think musicians deserve to be paid but still manage to rationalize taking from them without paying instead.
- wasdfff 7y ago
  Nothing wrong with buying merch and concert tickets while pirating the discography. Fuck the record label.
  - paulcole 7y ago
    Yeah there is. Taking something you shouldn't is by almost any definition wrong. Except when it comes to music and movies apparently.
    - SomeOldThrow 7y ago
      Grandpa’s property rights have no weight in the digital era. If you’re going to make something free to copy the last thing you should do is get mad when people copy it. What’s the point? Just charge people to watch.

afiori 7y ago

This remind me of when steam tried to monetize mods and the ensuing outrage forgot to mention that some of the biggest modders (as is most popular skyrim mods) receive less than 100$ for years of work in donations.

scumbert 7y ago

> It turns out, a vast majority of people who complain about ads will not put their money where their mouth is. No matter how many times this pans out, people try and convince themselves all netizens are altruistic, with the means to bankroll content creators. That just doesn't measure up to reality.

Chathamization 7y ago

> It's unfortunate that internet people have been falsely conditioned to believe the people who create the media we consume shouldn't be paid. Most of the media we consume is probably detrimental to us, even before advertising is factored in. It's not a bad thing when people have to make a choice in whether or not something is worth the money, and end up deciding it's not. It seems like people are better able to understand monetary costs than time or brain space costs. As an aside, some of the highest quality content I've found is free and without advertisements (for example, the Ottoman History Podcast or the Religions of the Ancient Mediterranean Podcast).

vorpalhex 7y ago
I've felt Dan Carlin (Hardcore History) has always had a very fair approach - the latest episodes are available and free with no advertisements. If you want the back catalog in it's entirety, it's a single lump sum of $50.

hrktb 7y ago

Wouldn't Patreon's success be a counterpoint ? The vast majority of people don't pay, but there seem to be enough people paying that it at least balances the ad dependency of a number of creators. I might be biased, but most of the content I really didn't want to go away or bend backward to get sponsors seem to have successful followings (99pi, the whole radiotopia rooster, Hello Internet, CGP Grey, a few minor ones like rebuild.fm) I think more and more the creative process could start by kickstarting the project and gauge how much of a public there is willing to pay for it, before going full steam ahead.

SomeOldThrow 7y ago
None if the podcasts I listen to have ads. I listen to about 15 distinct podcasts. There’s clearly a market.

bogomipz 7y ago

>"It's unfortunate that internet people have been falsely conditioned to believe the people who create the media we consume shouldn't be paid." Nowhere did I see in the OPs post that they believe people who create content shouldn't be paid. NPR is a publicly funded non profit which also gets revenues from corporate sponsors, endowments and foundations[1] and this model has served them and their listeners well. The OPs concerns as I understand it is one that is grounded in the excitement surrounding this new windfall of ad revenue from podcasts and it's possible effects on an organization that proudly proclaims their independence. Lastly aside from a couple of programs(All Things Considered and Morning Edition) NPR is not a content creator. They purchase content from PRI, WNYC Studios, and American Public Media. They are more of distributor and reseller of content. [1] https://www.npr.org/about-npr/178660742/public-radio-finances https://www.npr.org/about-npr/178660742/public-radio-finance...