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Key para: The web has to mature beyond advertising as a business model. For this to happen people are going to have to open their wallets, pay for the services

by dash2 6y ago

Key para: The web has to mature beyond advertising as a business model. For this to happen people are going to have to open their wallets, pay for the services they use, and support independent businesses. That’s how we build a web where indies can thrive - one that’s more village centre than financial centre. I think the shift is underway. True/false?

pbronez 6y ago
I’m certainly sympathetic to this idea. The marginal cost to serve an HTTP request is vanishingly small, but the fixed costs to develop the application itself (mostly labor) is pretty high. That means your cost per user is pretty high at first, since all that work supports a handful of people. You seek more users to amortize costs further, and it works until you start accumulating enough HTTP requests and user data that costs start to climb again. And of course more users means more use cases and user agents, which require ongoing maintenance investments. The whole process doesn’t have to be expensive, but it’s certainly not free. You can build very cool stuff and give it away for free, but sustainability and scalability ultimately require revenue. The magic thing about a successful business is the ability to cover execution costs, support the development team, and still leave value on the table for users. I think digital services have drastically different economics depending on (1) how adding a NEW user changes the value proposition for EXISTING users, and (2) something like the user’s start up/discovery cost relative to lifetime value A direct payment model makes sense when your users’ value is independent from the size of the user base (assuming performance scales at least linearly). These services can tolerate moderate startup/discovery costs. For critical enterprise services, startup costs can be high because the lifetime value is still much larger. If value scales with the user base, as in a social network like good reads, then startup/discovery cost must be pushed to zero to grow the user base as quickly as possible. A paywall slows user base growth and reduces value for those users that actually choose to pay. So far, advertising is the only known way to monetize (and thus sustain) a digital service while maintaining near-zero startup/discovery costs for individual users. Micropayments, even with good UX and low fees, increase joining costs relative to advertising. Thus they will reduce the value of the service to paying users if value scales with user base size, but would benefit services where value is independent of user base size. Federation is maybe the best way out of this dilemma IMHO. The value of the overall network grows with the user base, so adding new federation partners should be near-free. Each instance is small relative to the network as a whole, and thus can focus on individual user value rather than growing the network, which means it can charge users directly. This is why you’re willing to buy a great Twitter or Reddit client app, but would never pay for a Twitter or Reddit subscription. (Yes I know those are centralized services, but the model holds if you look at the business relationships).
- BlueTemplar 6y ago
  Ideally, "book reviews" would be a semantic web category, which a search engine could fetch from personal websites. (Note that this already kind of works with current search engines.) But the incentives were never really aligned for that...
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
chordalkeyboard 6y ago
I don't know if its true but I think its a valid perspective and so there's likely some truth there. People don't want to pay for content. If people pay for content and feel ripped off, they can ask for a refund. Then cheaters can pay to access the content then ask for their money back if they want to. This puts the content provider in a bad position. If people pay for content, then they want to have that content themselves forever. In some sense, this is fair. But then they want to share that content with others. Then the other person/people don't need to pay. Now you have a problem where everyone can just get the content when one person has paid for it. This is a bad dilemma where content providers and consumers both seem to have a good case. Since neither pay model seems to work, companies just show ads. Then people ignore ads, so the ad companies make them more attention-grabbing and intrusively targeted. So people use reader mode and ad blockers. Now no one is looking at the ads that pay for the content. I wish I knew the answer.
- rowanG077 6y ago
  I'd say piracy like you are saying is not even a blib on the radar. Steam, Netflix and Spotify have proven this.
  - chordalkeyboard 6y ago
    I think it depends on the genre. Sci-Hub is hugely popular [0] among academics and the academic publishers allege that they are missing out on a lot of money because of it (Can't find the source now). [0] https://familyinequality.wordpress.com/2020/01/15/sci-hub-users-cost-asa-journals-hundreds-of-thousands-of-downloads-and-thats-ok/ https://familyinequality.wordpress.com/2020/01/15/sci-hub-us...
    - rowanG077 6y ago
      That's a completely different game. Academic publisher have little value add. They essentially steal and make money of the work of scientist while the scientist themselves have to pay them. This is not comparable to piracy in the consumer sense.
randomchars 6y ago
Sadly I don't think the majority of the people are willing to pay. Getting things for "free" is so ingrained into how the web is, that it's too big of a paradigm shift now.
oefrha 6y ago
The web was built to facilitate the exchange of knowledge. Ad-sponsored content, despite shortcomings, has so far kept textual content mostly free of charge (talking about content that wouldn’t exist by voluntary contribution here). I fear this push for paywalls is merely going to further disadvantage poor people and people in developing countries who can’t easily hook into whatever payment scheme that is required. No, I don’t have a great solution other than the status quo.
sdflhasjd 6y ago
True, but I don't think the shift is underway. I think in order for this to happen, there's going to have to be better payment models than $4-9 a month subscriptions.
- canofbars 6y ago
  Agreed. There are so many services I hardly use but would happily pay $5-10/year for but their paid services are targeted only at the power users who are happy to pay $10/month for.
jmnicolas 6y ago
> For this to happen people are going to have to open their wallets, pay for the services they use, and support independent businesses. Yes but to be frank if I had to pay for everything I use I would go broke. We're not all on SV salaries here. I have about 100€ of disposable income per month. If I put it on online things, it means I would have to stay at home (I mean pre or post pandemic times).
- phendrenad2 6y ago
  The problem is, companies overcharge in dollars and undercharge in ads. Your visit to a website may make that site, say, $0.1 in ads. Would you pay $0.1 per day? Of course you would. But when they add a paid ad-free option? It's more like $1 a day. They're greedy.
  - abdullahkhalids 6y ago
    Moreover, running a site with ads and tracking has higher hosting costs than a cleaner one that just serves contents to paying customers.
    - foota 6y ago
      I don't think it's much of a difference, given most of that will be third party and content can be (but isn't always) heavy.
    - est31 6y ago
      The part of the website that does payment processing and ensures only authorized users can view content isn't free either.
  - Cederfjard 6y ago
    In your scenario they need ten times the free users to get the same revenue as one paying customer yields. Presumably, for most services we’re talking about here the marginal cost of having one user versus ten is probably negligable. It doesn’t seem unlikely to me that if a sevice starts charging, 90% of the users drop off, and thus the revenue per user needs to increase commensurately in order to have the same profits. Of course this is totally made up, so it’s impossible to argue about, but my point is that what you described didn’t necessarily seem out of line to me.
bschne 6y ago
It sometimes feels like ad-supported online offerings are a bit like cheap fossil fuels in a way. The negative consequences across the board are obvious. This goes for the short-term, immediate nuisances it creates, but people who think about the hard questions also see the long-term negative consequences way ahead. Unfortunately, advertising has also created an unsustainably high "standard of living", so to speak - you get so many services and applications for free these days that would realistically not exist or cost much more than you were willing to pay for them had it not been for advertising. Personally, I don't think there's a way out of it until someone comes up with an alternative that brings the benefits of advertising without all the downsides it has, because individual consumer incentives are just not aligned. I'll gladly pay a one-time fee for some productivity app, or a small subscription for something I use almost daily. But if e.g. goodreads wanted to charge a subscription, community size would probably dwindle, and personally I'd just start keeping a spreadsheet of my books again.
- pbronez 6y ago
  I like Affiliate Links for this. It’s above-board, acknowledged, and aligns user, publisher and advertiser value. There’s still some privacy costs, but they’re focused on users that actually take action to engage with the promotion.
  - sokoloff 6y ago
    The alignment is imperfect at best. How many “review” sites do you see out there with reviews that are shallow (to put it politely) and consist primarily of gigantic “check price on Amazon” buttons? If you ban ads and monetize only via affiliate links, I think you’ll see a lot more poorly written, often algorithmically generated content shilling for affiliate clicks.
dsohn0 6y ago
That’s how we build a web where indies can thrive - one that’s more village centre than financial centre. For this to happen people are going to have to open their wallets, pay for the services they use, and support independent businesses.
timwaagh 6y ago
A web where everything needs a subscription is a closed web. I would only subscribe to the things i deem fun enough or necessary enough. So that would be perhaps fb, Whatsapp, Gmail, Tinder, Netflix and Amazon. The latter three i already subscribed to.
polote 6y ago
Most people don't have money, and when I say most, I mean at least 90% of people. So free services powered by ads are the best thing for them, and those people are the large majority.
- avian 6y ago
  I'm not sure it's that clear. The fact that free services with ads manage to thrive means that they somehow manage to extract money from those 99% of people. I'm pretty sure it's not only the richest 1% supporting the whole Internet ad eco-system. Ads convince people to spend money on some product they wouldn't buy otherwise. This in term finances those ads which finances the service. I'm not convinced this is better in the long run for many than paying services directly.
  - jlokier 6y ago
    > The fact that free services with ads manage to thrive means that they somehow manage to extract money from those 99% of people I think that doesn't hold logical water. If only 1% of people buy things of significant value based on ads, and 99% of people never buy what's advertised, it is still worth advertising while advertising is cheap. A related phenomenon is the way online games make their money. The vast majority of players never pay for anything. A few pay a little, and a tiny minority pay so much more than everyone else that it's the tiny minority that the game-maker depends on for their business.
  - inglor_cz 6y ago
    I am not sure why are you getting downvoted. If vast majority of Internet users were broke, there would be no sense in tracking them and showing them ads for paid products/services. Looking at the strain of our local delivery services right now, that cannot be just 10 per cent of people shopping.
- dash2 6y ago
  I'm not sure what "don't have money" means here. Presumably 90% of users do have some money. I would think most of them pay money for internet access. The question is whether they can afford service X given the other things they would prefer to pay for.
Catsandkites 6y ago
I would happily pay for all of the services I use. The problem is that that isn't enough for them and it would still be an capitalistic greed anti-consumer shit show. If I pay I want: No ads, no tracking, full access to my own data in sane export formats, schemas, no data mining, no data selling, no "sharing data with our partners", encryption options, no dumb hoops, no dark patterns, the ability to point a product at an API endpoint of my choosing, backup options that default to my infrastructure first and so on. Actually let's add more: The data generated by my use of my data in the product. Non-canned support responses that don't ask for information I literally put in the ticket three weeks ago. Prominent indication of where (geographically and legally) data is stored and used. If/how often you do backups. If/how often you practice disaster recovery. So really what I want to pay for is sanity and no bullshit. Yet if I do pay, many services and companies will still do all of this shit in the background until midnight the day it's finally made illegal, all the while gaslighting me about "how much they value me as a customer" and how they "respect" our "relationship". It's literally obscene.
- mettamage 6y ago
  What would you consider to be a reasonable price?
- est31 6y ago
  Yeah if you pay then they'll have strong identities linked to the accounts in addition to the tracking. Free services that can be accessed without a log in on the other hand have to correlate all the data. They are quite good at it, but not perfect.
  - jhrmnn 6y ago
    That’s not different from pre-Internet era, though. Subscriptions were never anonymous.
    - est31 6y ago
      Of course, the fact that you were subscribed was known to them, but which articles you read in your paper copy of the new york times they didn't know, unless you specifically told them. Nowadays the Reddit redesign tracks your mouse movements, Netflix when you pause a video, and Amazon which page of the book you are reading. I don't want any of this tracking for myself. I have no problem with people opting in, but don't make this tracking inescapable. A tracking free format would involve in you downloading the entire newspaper issue, then reading inside in ways of your own choosing.
lazyjones 6y ago
There's already plenty of paid content available, but for now, the advertising model wins? Why? Because most paid content is simply too expensive. You can't charge $5-$10 or more for rarely used niche stuff when Netflix is $8.99 and when musicians get $0.01 per streamed view or less.
Ekaros 6y ago
One wonders if there is even business model on web? Maybe it would be better to go back to passion projects. Ones where person making content also pays for the hosting. Probably leads to lot less content being around, but also removes money. Ofc, this could exist with actual paid services.
- dan1234 6y ago
  I think a lot of these services could also be run more efficiently. I’ve not used GoodReads before but it appears to be a book recommendation service. I’m surprised they can’t run the main site & API on Amazon referral links for the recommended books.
  - pbronez 6y ago
    Well, they got bought by Amazon so basically the whole site is a feature of the Kindle Store at this point.
  - beowulfey 6y ago
    Believe it or not, Goodreads is actually owned by Amazon.
    - dan1234 6y ago
      Ah, I had no idea! Makes me think there’s a different reason for closing the API, because Amazon could run the service for close to nothing on AWS.
AltruisticGapHN 6y ago
This is way, way beyond the web. Cue in "the century of the self". Advertising and self deception is too embedded in our culture and way of life. Also cue in "Ways of seeing". Iow, I believe advertising is symptomatic of our current state of consciousness as a collective, and so it is not a cause.
- pbronez 6y ago
  Thanks for the reference to Ways Of Seeing by John Berger, looks interesting.
Zhyl 6y ago
The model dictates the medium. Advertising as a model has forced a need for engagement, notifications, stickiness, attention grabbing. I'd argue the term 'pay for the services [they use]' is too vague here to be meaningful - there are too many options that would drastically change the incentives. Pay per API call? APIs start to need 5 calls to get all the info you'd need for one request. Subscription model? Consumers are going to have to juggle a different account for every provider they use. Subscription to aggregator who then pays content providers based on usage? We're back to the clickbait situation we were in in the early days of advertising and are arguable still in. For me the insane thing is that there are no options. I can't universally buy any song I want DRM free from a range of providers. I can't pay per article for news from an RSS feed. TV is an interesting one because the industry has convinced the user base to pay for content, but the subscription model is already showing some of the limitations shown above. I feel like the biggest innovations in this space aren't so much new ideas or 'just convincing people to pay for things', it's a case of making the payments as easy and understandable as their previous counterparts.
- octoberfranklin 6y ago
  > it's a case of making the payments as easy and understandable as their previous counterparts. Blame AML/KYC. Frictionless, permissionless micropayments are illegal. On purpose. This is not a social or technological problem. It is a legal problem. AML/KYC does not scale.
  - rswail 6y ago
    Frictionless, permissionless large payments are illegal. The problem is that no one has worked out how to make micropayments costless, and that has nothing to do with AML/KYC and everything to do with the costs of running a payment system. Bitcoin has turned out to be expensive to mine. Most other distributed ledger "currencies" have been launched to make money for the creators of the artificial scarcity. Governments cannot give up control of the money supply but they are the only ones that can establish a form of electronic currency that works the same as cash does now. Whether they're willing to make it as anonymous as cash or allow it to be exchanged for other government's electronic currency is part of the problem that needs to be solved.
CaptArmchair 6y ago
> The web has to mature beyond advertising as a business model. Is the Web a business model? The Web really is machines serving HTML, JSON, XML,... over HTTP/HTTPS across physical connections. There are several ways of looking at this, but often enough the debate gets reduced into a dichotomy. I'll put this into two simplified extremes. The Web is a shared infrastructure seen as a "public commons". You can access that infrastructure, request/receive bits and bytes from other machines for free and if you want to host content yourself, you connect your own machine to that infrastructure and you share content via your own machine for free. You carry the costs of the usage of the infrastructure yourself, regardless of the direction of data traffic across the network. The Web and it's infrastructure are commodities. Storage, maintenance, bandwidth,... are expenses that should be offloaded. The main goal of hosting and making information available on the Web is to, either directly or indirectly, make a marginal profit. You pay for the privilege of accessing someone else's machine to download data, and you get paid by those who want to gain access to information you host on your own machine. The problem with the statement above is that it implies that both extremes are mutually exclusive, and only the latter one is viable. This is false. The Web is ultimately a decentralized network which is build on top of intentions and goals of humans. And those intentions and goals can be wildly differing. There are parts of the Web that operate according to the former idea, and there are parts that operate according to the latter. Both exist, and there's a spectrum in between. In the analogue world, the same notion translates into private businesses, non-profits, cooperations, community initiatives, charities, public initiatives and so on. Goodreads choosing to close down it's public API is just one case choosing to move towards one side of the spectrum. It's by no means an indication that the entirety of the Web and - more specifically - it's denizens decide to move towards that side. That spectrum does emerge based on laws of economics, though. Goodreads has always been a private business. public API's of private businesses are never truly "Public". They are either a courtesy or a business investment. And they will step away from such courtesy if the costs outstrip the benefits. The Web isn't quite the same as public space though - parks, beaches, forests, streets, grasslands,... - because the vast amount of infrastructure is privately owned. In that regard, the notion of "The Web is a Commons" is only true to the extent that private people are willing to accept and support that idea, and are willing to carry a shared part of the costs. It's that last part which makes all the difference. Operating a basic website with a limited number of visitors comes at a low cost, and so one could operate a small Goodreads like website with a niche of books. There are plenty of examples of people keeping freely accessible blogs and the like with their own book reviews. Goodreads tries to turn that idea into a business model. The intention of generating a profit is very distinct in that regard. However, not only is it hard to sell the opinions of other people, it's even harder if costs generated by trying to cater to an audience of millions outstrip the revenue generated. The Web isn't financial centre. Just like London nor New York aren't representative as to the entirety of human society. Big businesses are - ultimately - only a part of the Web, just as much as they are only a part of society. And if their business models fail to keep them operational, the Web, and society, will, ultimately, churn on without them.
chippy 6y ago
Isn't Goodreads primarily a community? Are there many pay-to-enter community websites?
- iamben 6y ago
  Lots - you just have to figure that the value you get is worth the price of entry. Usually it's an "I'm going to learn something, or learn from people enough that will cover the cost of community" or an "I'm going to satisfy a personal need" (be that meditating, new recipes, or getting tied up and whipped).
idclip 6y ago
True. Web “Advertising” is a poison that is shredding society apart.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
zozbot234 6y ago
> For this to happen people are going to have to open their wallets, pay for the services they use, and support independent businesses. Crowdfunding is probably the best solution, if it can be made to work - it would allow for some kind of monetization on a voluntary basis, while preserving free access for most users. But I don't know of any site that really uses it successfully, aside from Wikipedia.
- BlueTemplar 6y ago
  I used Flattr, but for some reason they have now discontinued their browser extension... :(
birdsbirdsbirds 6y ago
True, it could work like pinboard or MetaFilter. In general, I doubt that the network effect can be overcome for consumer platforms. People want to share their book reviews. Why should they limit themselves to people who pay? Paying only works for those who want social filtering. To compete with Goodreads, the data would have to be free like Wikipedia, for other competitors to emerge so that it is not just a village but a country with many villages. But then, it's a rtf reader situation where it is difficult to survive as an app creating company.
wojciii 6y ago
I want to pay for stuff that I want to read/consume. The problem is that no one implemented micro payments and wants me to pay some amount every month for crap that I don't want (Netflix, spotify, Disney, newspapers). This needs to end first.
- BlueTemplar 6y ago
  I used Flattr, but they have now discontinued their browser extension... :(
  - wojciii 6y ago
    I think that the traditional card/banking companies who handle transactions are probable stopping any innovation in this area. They have a working model and no reason for innovation if it works. The newspapers and traditional banking are slowly bleeding/dying here in DK so perhaps they need to die off before something new can take their place.
Waterluvian 6y ago
Where we are now is the best it's going to get. Switching away from ads will feel good until some do-nothing decides they'll hit their bonus targets by re-introducing ads in addition to the subscriptions. This has happened many times. It's obviously going to happen again. You do not want to normalize subscriptions for every old Web service, trust me.
mcintyre1994 6y ago
It makes me really curious to know how they plan to monetise readng too. There’s no pricing or anything yet that I can see, but I wonder if that’s where they plan to go post-beta.
_Understated_ 6y ago
> The web has to mature beyond advertising as a business model. I've said it many times before but it's worth repeating... The Internet survived just fine before all the ads and tracking and it will survive fine without it.
- josteink 6y ago
  Back then the internet was created and run by enthusiasts which passionately wanted to share and build. Today it’s run by people, standing on their shoulders, whose dominant motivation is making money or how to “capitalise” on something, something which they have no fundamental interests or passion for. Obviously the outcome is going to be different.
tinus_hn 6y ago
This kind of service is pretty trivial, you can run it for cents per user. If you allow the web to move to a model where you have to pay dollars for a service worth cents it turns into the same kind of market as the mobile phone operators market charging fees for sms messages: a total rip off. Why does this needs to be a business anyway? The only reason is because it can be.
snarf21 6y ago
We need to start taxing digital advertising heavily. All it creates are dark patterns.
VoodooJuJu 6y ago
Advertising is just too lucrative for them - they'll still do it even if we end up paying subscriptions. For example, look at the New York Times; you're still served ads with a paying subscription.
Privacy846 6y ago
I choose the third value, “ridiculous premise”. People love to craw about how “you are the product” because they don’t pay for some service. Well, physical newspapers have been advertiser-funded for a long time now, even though people still pay for them. Chomsky writes in Necessary Illusions that newspapers sell the eyeballs of the readers to advertisers and that that in turn deeply affects what is printed. That book was published in 1989. As far as the media is concerned, everyone here under the age of sixty have always been the product. And it’s deeply naïve and idealistic to think that “paying for their services”—how will they do that? Oh well—will change something which is now completely fundamental to media as we know it.
door99 6y ago
The Web needs the equivalent of public access television or public radio -- platforms that are sustained for public good via public money and/or donations
wpietri 6y ago
I think it's a nice idea, and I love the spirit of it. That's certainly how I try to live. I have a lot of small subscriptions, and my Patreon bill is over $100/month. But I think individual action isn't sufficient to get us over the hump. There are just too many things we use on a daily basis, and often those things use things that use things. "Free" is an illusion, but it's an illusion with a very low cognitive load. Manually supporting each and every thing I appreciate at the right level is a complex and taxing process. In practice, I'm sure I miss a lot. In the physical world, we have some solutions for this. I don't have to subscribe to each park I use. I don't have to kick in for each sidewalk tree I walk by. I live in a neighborhood with a lot of street and alley murals, all community supported in various ways. I think the next step forward for the web involves finding ways for collective action with low individual cognitive load. It wouldn't be perfect, but it could be better than what we have now.
downrightmike 6y ago
False, one of the big players will either rip them off(snapchat) or force them into a buyout by under cutting them (diapers.com)
ptman 6y ago
https://webmonetization.org/ https://webmonetization.org/ / https://coil.com/ https://coil.com/
dexen 6y ago
>people are going to have to open their wallets, pay for the services they use, and support independent businesses. Yes indeed. Right now news & opinion are largely limited to what is considered "advertiser friendly" - think short news cycle, and other problems. The perspective of paying pennies for everything introduces a lot of friction. Luckily an alternative model is making roadway, mostly in Youtube circles: pay a couple of your favorite creators, and watch the rest for free. The extension of the old "freemium" model, but this time based around stochastic balance between viewers who pay this or that creator. The paying subscribers often get access to additional material - one that's more geared towards fans or deeply interested viewers - while the regulars, free-to-watch, viewers get the general content just fine.

by dash2 6y ago

pbronez 6y ago

I’m certainly sympathetic to this idea. The marginal cost to serve an HTTP request is vanishingly small, but the fixed costs to develop the application itself (mostly labor) is pretty high. That means your cost per user is pretty high at first, since all that work supports a handful of people. You seek more users to amortize costs further, and it works until you start accumulating enough HTTP requests and user data that costs start to climb again. And of course more users means more use cases and user agents, which require ongoing maintenance investments. The whole process doesn’t have to be expensive, but it’s certainly not free. You can build very cool stuff and give it away for free, but sustainability and scalability ultimately require revenue. The magic thing about a successful business is the ability to cover execution costs, support the development team, and still leave value on the table for users. I think digital services have drastically different economics depending on (1) how adding a NEW user changes the value proposition for EXISTING users, and (2) something like the user’s start up/discovery cost relative to lifetime value A direct payment model makes sense when your users’ value is independent from the size of the user base (assuming performance scales at least linearly). These services can tolerate moderate startup/discovery costs. For critical enterprise services, startup costs can be high because the lifetime value is still much larger. If value scales with the user base, as in a social network like good reads, then startup/discovery cost must be pushed to zero to grow the user base as quickly as possible. A paywall slows user base growth and reduces value for those users that actually choose to pay. So far, advertising is the only known way to monetize (and thus sustain) a digital service while maintaining near-zero startup/discovery costs for individual users. Micropayments, even with good UX and low fees, increase joining costs relative to advertising. Thus they will reduce the value of the service to paying users if value scales with user base size, but would benefit services where value is independent of user base size. Federation is maybe the best way out of this dilemma IMHO. The value of the overall network grows with the user base, so adding new federation partners should be near-free. Each instance is small relative to the network as a whole, and thus can focus on individual user value rather than growing the network, which means it can charge users directly. This is why you’re willing to buy a great Twitter or Reddit client app, but would never pay for a Twitter or Reddit subscription. (Yes I know those are centralized services, but the model holds if you look at the business relationships).

BlueTemplar 6y ago
Ideally, "book reviews" would be a semantic web category, which a search engine could fetch from personal websites. (Note that this already kind of works with current search engines.) But the incentives were never really aligned for that...

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

chordalkeyboard 6y ago

I don't know if its true but I think its a valid perspective and so there's likely some truth there. People don't want to pay for content. If people pay for content and feel ripped off, they can ask for a refund. Then cheaters can pay to access the content then ask for their money back if they want to. This puts the content provider in a bad position. If people pay for content, then they want to have that content themselves forever. In some sense, this is fair. But then they want to share that content with others. Then the other person/people don't need to pay. Now you have a problem where everyone can just get the content when one person has paid for it. This is a bad dilemma where content providers and consumers both seem to have a good case. Since neither pay model seems to work, companies just show ads. Then people ignore ads, so the ad companies make them more attention-grabbing and intrusively targeted. So people use reader mode and ad blockers. Now no one is looking at the ads that pay for the content. I wish I knew the answer.

rowanG077 6y ago
I'd say piracy like you are saying is not even a blib on the radar. Steam, Netflix and Spotify have proven this.
- chordalkeyboard 6y ago
  I think it depends on the genre. Sci-Hub is hugely popular [0] among academics and the academic publishers allege that they are missing out on a lot of money because of it (Can't find the source now). [0] https://familyinequality.wordpress.com/2020/01/15/sci-hub-users-cost-asa-journals-hundreds-of-thousands-of-downloads-and-thats-ok/ https://familyinequality.wordpress.com/2020/01/15/sci-hub-us...
  - rowanG077 6y ago
    That's a completely different game. Academic publisher have little value add. They essentially steal and make money of the work of scientist while the scientist themselves have to pay them. This is not comparable to piracy in the consumer sense.

randomchars 6y ago

Sadly I don't think the majority of the people are willing to pay. Getting things for "free" is so ingrained into how the web is, that it's too big of a paradigm shift now.

oefrha 6y ago

The web was built to facilitate the exchange of knowledge. Ad-sponsored content, despite shortcomings, has so far kept textual content mostly free of charge (talking about content that wouldn’t exist by voluntary contribution here). I fear this push for paywalls is merely going to further disadvantage poor people and people in developing countries who can’t easily hook into whatever payment scheme that is required. No, I don’t have a great solution other than the status quo.

sdflhasjd 6y ago

True, but I don't think the shift is underway. I think in order for this to happen, there's going to have to be better payment models than $4-9 a month subscriptions.

canofbars 6y ago
Agreed. There are so many services I hardly use but would happily pay $5-10/year for but their paid services are targeted only at the power users who are happy to pay $10/month for.

jmnicolas 6y ago

> For this to happen people are going to have to open their wallets, pay for the services they use, and support independent businesses. Yes but to be frank if I had to pay for everything I use I would go broke. We're not all on SV salaries here. I have about 100€ of disposable income per month. If I put it on online things, it means I would have to stay at home (I mean pre or post pandemic times).

phendrenad2 6y ago
The problem is, companies overcharge in dollars and undercharge in ads. Your visit to a website may make that site, say, $0.1 in ads. Would you pay $0.1 per day? Of course you would. But when they add a paid ad-free option? It's more like $1 a day. They're greedy.
- abdullahkhalids 6y ago
  Moreover, running a site with ads and tracking has higher hosting costs than a cleaner one that just serves contents to paying customers.
  - foota 6y ago
    I don't think it's much of a difference, given most of that will be third party and content can be (but isn't always) heavy.
  - est31 6y ago
    The part of the website that does payment processing and ensures only authorized users can view content isn't free either.
- Cederfjard 6y ago
  In your scenario they need ten times the free users to get the same revenue as one paying customer yields. Presumably, for most services we’re talking about here the marginal cost of having one user versus ten is probably negligable. It doesn’t seem unlikely to me that if a sevice starts charging, 90% of the users drop off, and thus the revenue per user needs to increase commensurately in order to have the same profits. Of course this is totally made up, so it’s impossible to argue about, but my point is that what you described didn’t necessarily seem out of line to me.

bschne 6y ago

It sometimes feels like ad-supported online offerings are a bit like cheap fossil fuels in a way. The negative consequences across the board are obvious. This goes for the short-term, immediate nuisances it creates, but people who think about the hard questions also see the long-term negative consequences way ahead. Unfortunately, advertising has also created an unsustainably high "standard of living", so to speak - you get so many services and applications for free these days that would realistically not exist or cost much more than you were willing to pay for them had it not been for advertising. Personally, I don't think there's a way out of it until someone comes up with an alternative that brings the benefits of advertising without all the downsides it has, because individual consumer incentives are just not aligned. I'll gladly pay a one-time fee for some productivity app, or a small subscription for something I use almost daily. But if e.g. goodreads wanted to charge a subscription, community size would probably dwindle, and personally I'd just start keeping a spreadsheet of my books again.

pbronez 6y ago
I like Affiliate Links for this. It’s above-board, acknowledged, and aligns user, publisher and advertiser value. There’s still some privacy costs, but they’re focused on users that actually take action to engage with the promotion.
- sokoloff 6y ago
  The alignment is imperfect at best. How many “review” sites do you see out there with reviews that are shallow (to put it politely) and consist primarily of gigantic “check price on Amazon” buttons? If you ban ads and monetize only via affiliate links, I think you’ll see a lot more poorly written, often algorithmically generated content shilling for affiliate clicks.

dsohn0 6y ago

That’s how we build a web where indies can thrive - one that’s more village centre than financial centre. For this to happen people are going to have to open their wallets, pay for the services they use, and support independent businesses.

timwaagh 6y ago

A web where everything needs a subscription is a closed web. I would only subscribe to the things i deem fun enough or necessary enough. So that would be perhaps fb, Whatsapp, Gmail, Tinder, Netflix and Amazon. The latter three i already subscribed to.

polote 6y ago

Most people don't have money, and when I say most, I mean at least 90% of people. So free services powered by ads are the best thing for them, and those people are the large majority.

avian 6y ago
I'm not sure it's that clear. The fact that free services with ads manage to thrive means that they somehow manage to extract money from those 99% of people. I'm pretty sure it's not only the richest 1% supporting the whole Internet ad eco-system. Ads convince people to spend money on some product they wouldn't buy otherwise. This in term finances those ads which finances the service. I'm not convinced this is better in the long run for many than paying services directly.
- jlokier 6y ago
  > The fact that free services with ads manage to thrive means that they somehow manage to extract money from those 99% of people I think that doesn't hold logical water. If only 1% of people buy things of significant value based on ads, and 99% of people never buy what's advertised, it is still worth advertising while advertising is cheap. A related phenomenon is the way online games make their money. The vast majority of players never pay for anything. A few pay a little, and a tiny minority pay so much more than everyone else that it's the tiny minority that the game-maker depends on for their business.
- inglor_cz 6y ago
  I am not sure why are you getting downvoted. If vast majority of Internet users were broke, there would be no sense in tracking them and showing them ads for paid products/services. Looking at the strain of our local delivery services right now, that cannot be just 10 per cent of people shopping.
dash2 6y ago
I'm not sure what "don't have money" means here. Presumably 90% of users do have some money. I would think most of them pay money for internet access. The question is whether they can afford service X given the other things they would prefer to pay for.

Catsandkites 6y ago

I would happily pay for all of the services I use. The problem is that that isn't enough for them and it would still be an capitalistic greed anti-consumer shit show. If I pay I want: No ads, no tracking, full access to my own data in sane export formats, schemas, no data mining, no data selling, no "sharing data with our partners", encryption options, no dumb hoops, no dark patterns, the ability to point a product at an API endpoint of my choosing, backup options that default to my infrastructure first and so on. Actually let's add more: The data generated by my use of my data in the product. Non-canned support responses that don't ask for information I literally put in the ticket three weeks ago. Prominent indication of where (geographically and legally) data is stored and used. If/how often you do backups. If/how often you practice disaster recovery. So really what I want to pay for is sanity and no bullshit. Yet if I do pay, many services and companies will still do all of this shit in the background until midnight the day it's finally made illegal, all the while gaslighting me about "how much they value me as a customer" and how they "respect" our "relationship". It's literally obscene.

mettamage 6y ago
What would you consider to be a reasonable price?
est31 6y ago
Yeah if you pay then they'll have strong identities linked to the accounts in addition to the tracking. Free services that can be accessed without a log in on the other hand have to correlate all the data. They are quite good at it, but not perfect.
- jhrmnn 6y ago
  That’s not different from pre-Internet era, though. Subscriptions were never anonymous.
  - est31 6y ago
    Of course, the fact that you were subscribed was known to them, but which articles you read in your paper copy of the new york times they didn't know, unless you specifically told them. Nowadays the Reddit redesign tracks your mouse movements, Netflix when you pause a video, and Amazon which page of the book you are reading. I don't want any of this tracking for myself. I have no problem with people opting in, but don't make this tracking inescapable. A tracking free format would involve in you downloading the entire newspaper issue, then reading inside in ways of your own choosing.

lazyjones 6y ago

There's already plenty of paid content available, but for now, the advertising model wins? Why? Because most paid content is simply too expensive. You can't charge $5-$10 or more for rarely used niche stuff when Netflix is $8.99 and when musicians get $0.01 per streamed view or less.

Ekaros 6y ago

One wonders if there is even business model on web? Maybe it would be better to go back to passion projects. Ones where person making content also pays for the hosting. Probably leads to lot less content being around, but also removes money. Ofc, this could exist with actual paid services.

dan1234 6y ago
I think a lot of these services could also be run more efficiently. I’ve not used GoodReads before but it appears to be a book recommendation service. I’m surprised they can’t run the main site & API on Amazon referral links for the recommended books.
- pbronez 6y ago
  Well, they got bought by Amazon so basically the whole site is a feature of the Kindle Store at this point.
- beowulfey 6y ago
  Believe it or not, Goodreads is actually owned by Amazon.
  - dan1234 6y ago
    Ah, I had no idea! Makes me think there’s a different reason for closing the API, because Amazon could run the service for close to nothing on AWS.

AltruisticGapHN 6y ago

This is way, way beyond the web. Cue in "the century of the self". Advertising and self deception is too embedded in our culture and way of life. Also cue in "Ways of seeing". Iow, I believe advertising is symptomatic of our current state of consciousness as a collective, and so it is not a cause.

pbronez 6y ago
Thanks for the reference to Ways Of Seeing by John Berger, looks interesting.

Zhyl 6y ago

The model dictates the medium. Advertising as a model has forced a need for engagement, notifications, stickiness, attention grabbing. I'd argue the term 'pay for the services [they use]' is too vague here to be meaningful - there are too many options that would drastically change the incentives. Pay per API call? APIs start to need 5 calls to get all the info you'd need for one request. Subscription model? Consumers are going to have to juggle a different account for every provider they use. Subscription to aggregator who then pays content providers based on usage? We're back to the clickbait situation we were in in the early days of advertising and are arguable still in. For me the insane thing is that there are no options. I can't universally buy any song I want DRM free from a range of providers. I can't pay per article for news from an RSS feed. TV is an interesting one because the industry has convinced the user base to pay for content, but the subscription model is already showing some of the limitations shown above. I feel like the biggest innovations in this space aren't so much new ideas or 'just convincing people to pay for things', it's a case of making the payments as easy and understandable as their previous counterparts.

octoberfranklin 6y ago
> it's a case of making the payments as easy and understandable as their previous counterparts. Blame AML/KYC. Frictionless, permissionless micropayments are illegal. On purpose. This is not a social or technological problem. It is a legal problem. AML/KYC does not scale.
- rswail 6y ago
  Frictionless, permissionless large payments are illegal. The problem is that no one has worked out how to make micropayments costless, and that has nothing to do with AML/KYC and everything to do with the costs of running a payment system. Bitcoin has turned out to be expensive to mine. Most other distributed ledger "currencies" have been launched to make money for the creators of the artificial scarcity. Governments cannot give up control of the money supply but they are the only ones that can establish a form of electronic currency that works the same as cash does now. Whether they're willing to make it as anonymous as cash or allow it to be exchanged for other government's electronic currency is part of the problem that needs to be solved.

CaptArmchair 6y ago

> The web has to mature beyond advertising as a business model. Is the Web a business model? The Web really is machines serving HTML, JSON, XML,... over HTTP/HTTPS across physical connections. There are several ways of looking at this, but often enough the debate gets reduced into a dichotomy. I'll put this into two simplified extremes. The Web is a shared infrastructure seen as a "public commons". You can access that infrastructure, request/receive bits and bytes from other machines for free and if you want to host content yourself, you connect your own machine to that infrastructure and you share content via your own machine for free. You carry the costs of the usage of the infrastructure yourself, regardless of the direction of data traffic across the network. The Web and it's infrastructure are commodities. Storage, maintenance, bandwidth,... are expenses that should be offloaded. The main goal of hosting and making information available on the Web is to, either directly or indirectly, make a marginal profit. You pay for the privilege of accessing someone else's machine to download data, and you get paid by those who want to gain access to information you host on your own machine. The problem with the statement above is that it implies that both extremes are mutually exclusive, and only the latter one is viable. This is false. The Web is ultimately a decentralized network which is build on top of intentions and goals of humans. And those intentions and goals can be wildly differing. There are parts of the Web that operate according to the former idea, and there are parts that operate according to the latter. Both exist, and there's a spectrum in between. In the analogue world, the same notion translates into private businesses, non-profits, cooperations, community initiatives, charities, public initiatives and so on. Goodreads choosing to close down it's public API is just one case choosing to move towards one side of the spectrum. It's by no means an indication that the entirety of the Web and - more specifically - it's denizens decide to move towards that side. That spectrum does emerge based on laws of economics, though. Goodreads has always been a private business. public API's of private businesses are never truly "Public". They are either a courtesy or a business investment. And they will step away from such courtesy if the costs outstrip the benefits. The Web isn't quite the same as public space though - parks, beaches, forests, streets, grasslands,... - because the vast amount of infrastructure is privately owned. In that regard, the notion of "The Web is a Commons" is only true to the extent that private people are willing to accept and support that idea, and are willing to carry a shared part of the costs. It's that last part which makes all the difference. Operating a basic website with a limited number of visitors comes at a low cost, and so one could operate a small Goodreads like website with a niche of books. There are plenty of examples of people keeping freely accessible blogs and the like with their own book reviews. Goodreads tries to turn that idea into a business model. The intention of generating a profit is very distinct in that regard. However, not only is it hard to sell the opinions of other people, it's even harder if costs generated by trying to cater to an audience of millions outstrip the revenue generated. The Web isn't financial centre. Just like London nor New York aren't representative as to the entirety of human society. Big businesses are - ultimately - only a part of the Web, just as much as they are only a part of society. And if their business models fail to keep them operational, the Web, and society, will, ultimately, churn on without them.

chippy 6y ago

Isn't Goodreads primarily a community? Are there many pay-to-enter community websites?

iamben 6y ago
Lots - you just have to figure that the value you get is worth the price of entry. Usually it's an "I'm going to learn something, or learn from people enough that will cover the cost of community" or an "I'm going to satisfy a personal need" (be that meditating, new recipes, or getting tied up and whipped).

idclip 6y ago

True. Web “Advertising” is a poison that is shredding society apart.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

zozbot234 6y ago

> For this to happen people are going to have to open their wallets, pay for the services they use, and support independent businesses. Crowdfunding is probably the best solution, if it can be made to work - it would allow for some kind of monetization on a voluntary basis, while preserving free access for most users. But I don't know of any site that really uses it successfully, aside from Wikipedia.

BlueTemplar 6y ago
I used Flattr, but for some reason they have now discontinued their browser extension... :(

birdsbirdsbirds 6y ago

True, it could work like pinboard or MetaFilter. In general, I doubt that the network effect can be overcome for consumer platforms. People want to share their book reviews. Why should they limit themselves to people who pay? Paying only works for those who want social filtering. To compete with Goodreads, the data would have to be free like Wikipedia, for other competitors to emerge so that it is not just a village but a country with many villages. But then, it's a rtf reader situation where it is difficult to survive as an app creating company.

wojciii 6y ago

I want to pay for stuff that I want to read/consume. The problem is that no one implemented micro payments and wants me to pay some amount every month for crap that I don't want (Netflix, spotify, Disney, newspapers). This needs to end first.

BlueTemplar 6y ago
I used Flattr, but they have now discontinued their browser extension... :(
- wojciii 6y ago
  I think that the traditional card/banking companies who handle transactions are probable stopping any innovation in this area. They have a working model and no reason for innovation if it works. The newspapers and traditional banking are slowly bleeding/dying here in DK so perhaps they need to die off before something new can take their place.

Waterluvian 6y ago

Where we are now is the best it's going to get. Switching away from ads will feel good until some do-nothing decides they'll hit their bonus targets by re-introducing ads in addition to the subscriptions. This has happened many times. It's obviously going to happen again. You do not want to normalize subscriptions for every old Web service, trust me.

mcintyre1994 6y ago

It makes me really curious to know how they plan to monetise readng too. There’s no pricing or anything yet that I can see, but I wonder if that’s where they plan to go post-beta.

_Understated_ 6y ago

> The web has to mature beyond advertising as a business model. I've said it many times before but it's worth repeating... The Internet survived just fine before all the ads and tracking and it will survive fine without it.

josteink 6y ago
Back then the internet was created and run by enthusiasts which passionately wanted to share and build. Today it’s run by people, standing on their shoulders, whose dominant motivation is making money or how to “capitalise” on something, something which they have no fundamental interests or passion for. Obviously the outcome is going to be different.

tinus_hn 6y ago

This kind of service is pretty trivial, you can run it for cents per user. If you allow the web to move to a model where you have to pay dollars for a service worth cents it turns into the same kind of market as the mobile phone operators market charging fees for sms messages: a total rip off. Why does this needs to be a business anyway? The only reason is because it can be.

snarf21 6y ago

We need to start taxing digital advertising heavily. All it creates are dark patterns.

VoodooJuJu 6y ago

Advertising is just too lucrative for them - they'll still do it even if we end up paying subscriptions. For example, look at the New York Times; you're still served ads with a paying subscription.

Privacy846 6y ago

I choose the third value, “ridiculous premise”. People love to craw about how “you are the product” because they don’t pay for some service. Well, physical newspapers have been advertiser-funded for a long time now, even though people still pay for them. Chomsky writes in Necessary Illusions that newspapers sell the eyeballs of the readers to advertisers and that that in turn deeply affects what is printed. That book was published in 1989. As far as the media is concerned, everyone here under the age of sixty have always been the product. And it’s deeply naïve and idealistic to think that “paying for their services”—how will they do that? Oh well—will change something which is now completely fundamental to media as we know it.

door99 6y ago

The Web needs the equivalent of public access television or public radio -- platforms that are sustained for public good via public money and/or donations

wpietri 6y ago

I think it's a nice idea, and I love the spirit of it. That's certainly how I try to live. I have a lot of small subscriptions, and my Patreon bill is over $100/month. But I think individual action isn't sufficient to get us over the hump. There are just too many things we use on a daily basis, and often those things use things that use things. "Free" is an illusion, but it's an illusion with a very low cognitive load. Manually supporting each and every thing I appreciate at the right level is a complex and taxing process. In practice, I'm sure I miss a lot. In the physical world, we have some solutions for this. I don't have to subscribe to each park I use. I don't have to kick in for each sidewalk tree I walk by. I live in a neighborhood with a lot of street and alley murals, all community supported in various ways. I think the next step forward for the web involves finding ways for collective action with low individual cognitive load. It wouldn't be perfect, but it could be better than what we have now.

downrightmike 6y ago

False, one of the big players will either rip them off(snapchat) or force them into a buyout by under cutting them (diapers.com)

ptman 6y ago

https://webmonetization.org/ https://webmonetization.org/ / https://coil.com/ https://coil.com/

dexen 6y ago

>people are going to have to open their wallets, pay for the services they use, and support independent businesses. Yes indeed. Right now news & opinion are largely limited to what is considered "advertiser friendly" - think short news cycle, and other problems. The perspective of paying pennies for everything introduces a lot of friction. Luckily an alternative model is making roadway, mostly in Youtube circles: pay a couple of your favorite creators, and watch the rest for free. The extension of the old "freemium" model, but this time based around stochastic balance between viewers who pay this or that creator. The paying subscribers often get access to additional material - one that's more geared towards fans or deeply interested viewers - while the regulars, free-to-watch, viewers get the general content just fine.