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The Whole Web Pays for Google and Facebook to Be Free

240 points by chewz 6y ago

readflaggedcomm 6y ago
No, not all my "media" was subsidized by ads before the internet. The author also fails to support the title, other than to weakly imply that somehow excluding ads on Netlifx has something to do with increased ad revenue on Facebook.
- mrweasel 6y ago
  Sports was the first think that came to mind when reading the article. True, previously TV based ads where worth more, and could help pay for licensing right, but those licensing fees as also balloned and consumers have to pay more directly. Sports is one area of media that will truly be disrupted as we’re already pushing the limit of what people will pay and advertising is no longer able to pay the difference.
  - dec0dedab0de 6y ago
    Especially ufc, I thought the only reason ppv could be so expensive was because people were having parties to cover it. I can't believe so many people paid so much during the pandemic.
    - oarsinsync 6y ago
      When there's nothing else to do, I can see people who are bored and lonely increasingly likely to spend money on something that they used to enjoy pre-pandemic in order to try and gain some enjoyment in an otherwise pretty depressing situation.
- anon98356 6y ago
  I think you have your cause and effect the wrong way around there. The argument put forward is that Netflix is forced to use a subscription model because Facebook and Google have almost complete control of the advertising market. In the specific case of Netlfix this probably isn't true as their business model is an online version of a business that already charged a subscription (cable TV). However in businesses that traditionally relied on advertising e.g. the New York Times as mentioned in the article, the transition to the internet is leading to more upfront charging i.e. Paywalls because they aren't getting the ad revenue required to offer their services for free. My personal take from the article isn't that all content use to be supported by ads (although I would suggest that a lot more of it was than most people realise). The issue is that the near duopoly Facebook and Google have on web advertising, mean those producing the content can no longer rely on advertising to fund themselves. As a result we are seeing more and more paywalls being put up to fund these businesses. The potential end result of this is that finding content will continue to be free and probably even get easier. Finding content you can consume for free however, is likely to get a lot tougher.
  - fakedang 6y ago
    Just a question, what's stopping NYT from using their own native ad experience embedded into their web page instead of relying on Google and Facebook? It's not like building an onsite tracking ad is secret stuff, is it? Rather, if ads are going to be better than those on Google and Facebook, they could charge a premium simply for eyeballs right?
    - anon98356 6y ago
      I believe they do use their own ad platform. But I would guess that the pricing of ads on Facebook and Google mean that even if they could charge a premium, it wouldn't be enough to sustain the business. There is only so much of a premium you can charge before no is willing to pay for your product.
  - readflaggedcomm 6y ago
    Netflix's business is an online version of their old business, which was a mail-in version of Blockbuster. No ads were involved in take-home videos, that I recall, other than late attempts at unskippable promos by the studios who released the movies themselves (that was after I gave up renting videos). I don't see any causal relationship at all.
    - anon98356 6y ago
      As I said in my second line, in the case of Netflix, I don't think this applies. Their business model has always been to charge users for content. However when looking at the rise in the number of papers going behind a paywall like the NY times, there is an argument to be made that this is being driven by the fact it is no longer viable to run an ad supported business because Google and Facebook have control of too much of the market
- mattl 6y ago
  Other than PBS/BBC, what other media isn't subsidized by ads?
  - readflaggedcomm 6y ago
    If you mean broadcast media, there have always been independent streams and feeds supported by listeners and hobbyists. There are even more since the internet began. But I took "media" to mean something more broad, including recordings, printed literature, and performances, which traditionally were mostly ad-free (excluding periodicals).
docdeek 6y ago
> The same applies to Twitter and Substack, where signing up to just four writers’ output at $5 a month each is already more than the cost of a $17 New York Times subscription, which gives you a greater breadth of coverage. Imagine I really like hamburgers. I might choose to $5 each week on a burger and be happy with the quality of a burger made by people who only make burgers. The alternative is spending $4 a week so I could access a buffet with lower quality burgers (after all, it’s not their speciality) but also hot dogs, sandwiches, poke bowls and sushi. Trying to convince me that the buffet is a better deal just because I have access to a wider range of foods when all I really want is a burger is not a winning argument for me.
- rad_gruchalski 6y ago
  You can't survive on a burger a week and you will eat other food too between your $5 burgers. So maybe it's worth spending the $4 / week covering "most of the other food" you gotta eat anyway.
  - docdeek 6y ago
    It’s not an exact analogy, that’s for sure. Maybe I could save it by asking where am I likely to get a better quality burger: the place that charges me $5 a week just for burgers, or the one that charges me only $4 a week AND I get a whole lot of other stuff I don’t like but could still consume
  - jrumbut 6y ago
    And, to strain the metaphor further, most of the $5 burger makers are just repackaging the $4 burgers since the $4 burger makers are the ones who gather the ingredients.
  - nxpnsv 6y ago
    Depends on the size of the burger I guess :D
  - HPsquared 6y ago
    Paying for news has become something of a "luxury" product. In these conditions, quality and satisfaction of a niche is more important than quantity (though quantity has a quality of its own)
fwn 6y ago
They argue that the centralization of advertising forces almost all companies to offer paid services and that those services lead to the overall online experience being more expensive. They conclude that "we should recognize the trade we’ve made from ad-subsidized media to ad-subsidized search and social networking", which I guess is a well-intended statement but somewhat obvious, right? Hacker News threads are filled with users arguing that they gladly pay a lot just to avoid advertising. Their last sentence > Perhaps now we can forge a better understanding of the value of content. It costs money to produce, so it should also cost money to consume. I think is important, but maybe not for their reasons. Current paid services are sometimes very overpriced, which is partly caused by the lack of easy and scalable micro-transactions and a missing understanding of what a specific service might be worth. On the other hand there are some great services that get underused because users don't think the up-front cost are justified. The turn to subscriptions that we see in random tiny auxiliary applications is a great example of that. The developers of a small CBT-App I used for a bit thought they were worth 8 euro a month. They tried it a few months and then gave up, largely because they apparently failed to find a shared understanding of their value with their users.
- sammorrowdrums 6y ago
  Incidentally I started paying $5/ month each to two micropayment platforms. The first Coil[1] uses Interledger micropayments protocol, which is cool because it is easy to both monetise your content, and is decentralized in terms of payment providers and receivers. I get payed into an uphold wallet, in Fiat currency. It pays out based on time on page mostly and has Imgur, Newgrounds and Twitch using it, and lots of blogs. Downside is for mobile where you can't run browser plugins you have to use their custom FF fork browser Puma. The second one Scroll[2] is a centralised one. That has bigger names attached and removes ads from things like The Atlantic and Bloomberg. It shows you a breakdown of where your monthly fee is split. I love not receiving ads, and I hope that this tech pans out, but I am only doing it as an experiment so far. Personally I would prefer Coil and its underlying protocol to succeed. But it is highly possible these all fail. At least I am avoiding ads, while still funding content. It shows promise. - [1] https://coil.com/ https://coil.com/ - [2] https://scroll.com/ https://scroll.com/
h0nd 6y ago
>News organizations, for example, didn’t charge readers, in the misguided hope that more eyeballs on their stories would bring in more revenue from the banner ads they displayed. Which part of this is misguided? That is exactly how it works. The more ads they can show, the more they are paid.
- drdec 6y ago
  I believe the author is saying that the misguided part was the idea that they would get more revenue from banner ads than they would through subscriptions.
  - h0nd 6y ago
    Well, that is a different statement than what he is saying.
- bollorior 6y ago
  Newspapers made a huge strategic error in how they approached advertising, which ultimately resulted in much of their value being essentially given away to Google. It used to be the case that much of (for example) the New York Times' advertising value came not just from the number of eyeballs, but from the specific nature of those eyeballs. Being able to target a specific category of people who read the NYT (they can afford the paper, they are likely to live in New York, they know long words, they have a specific worldview, etc) is incredibly valuable to advertisers. Market segmentation by publication is very powerful - even knowing that a viewer doesn't have much money, or hates buying things, or is cynical about advertising is more valuable than not knowing anything. It's the reason that so many niche magazines exist. Advertising to someone who cares about a very specific hobby is worth a lot. It's also the reason that most printed publications aren't free. Many could be if you take a simplistic view of the economics. However they would dilute their audience to the point where it would become less valuable to advertisers. Vogue advertises to people who want to look at fashion photos enough to pay $9 or whatever to do so. With the internet, two things changed. Firstly the fact that anyone in the world could read a given article for free, meant that the average eyeball on a NYT article was much less 'NYT-reader-ish' than an eyeball on a printed page of the paper. Secondly, tracking and analytics meant that there was much more valuable and monetizable information about that reader than the fact that they are a NYT reader. Information like all the other things they have looked at, what they've recently bought, what apps they have installed, the content of their emails. Only the big tech companies and data brokers have this info. The data that the NYT has on you is trivial in comparison. It didn't have to be this way. Newspapers could have ringfenced their own data and sold ads in a way which kept them in control. As a side effect it would have been better for their readers' privacy. They failed to understand their own business as well as Google did. Now consumers are being blamed for this, for 'making the wrong choices'. I resent this for several reasons. Firstly it is an argument which denies the nature of reality. It is analogous with telling people they shouldn't shop at Wal-Mart, because local businesses will close. The solution is to change the rules to optimize for the things that we care about. Not to rely on the unlikely event that lots of people with limited resources will all make altruistic decisions to protect the nebulous thing that you care about. Secondly these newspapers set themselves up as society's only defenders of liberty and truth against the forces of darkness. In fact, a lot of them are full of propaganda, gossip and clickbait. Some of the $5 newsletters are in a class above almost everything in these newspapers. The people writing them are (typically) experts on one topic, they love that topic passionately, they have no particular axe to grind and they have much incentives to make something high quality.
wwww4all 6y ago
Basically, the legacy establishment media is complaining about the new establishment social media. Same thing as the the obsolete horse and buggy industry complaining about the automobiles taking up all the street space and causing traffic. The establishment media got big, fat and lazy with their monopoly and selling limited ad space. When the ads space became infinite in the web, they didn’t innovate and pivot to web technologies. Google and Facebook innovated web technologies and leveraged their tools to filter and target valuable audience attention space. The establishment media is obsolete and no amount of complaining is going to change the dynamic of the web. All they can do is talk about their high school glory days of scoring 5 touchdowns in high school championship game.
villasv 6y ago
I understand the bickering between media and social networks. Aggregators have disrupted the standard media business and a clash was inevitable. Including Substack in the fight, on the other hand, is pathetic. One would expect journalists to support each other and Substack is a tool _tailored for them_.
- snicksnak 6y ago
  Most of the corporate press hate substack and think it's beneath them, I saw it being labeled as "onlyfans for journalists". That's coming mostly from mediocre journalists who envy substack writers with a huge profile and try to demonize them. But it also comes from institutions, like the UCLA information studies professor who tried to vilify substack writes. Matt Taibbi wrote a response worth reading https://taibbi.substack.com/p/in-defense-of-substack https://taibbi.substack.com/p/in-defense-of-substack
- u678u 6y ago
  I like the idea of substack, but realistically the most popular journalists will be the ones with the biggest stunts and clickbait. I just want a plain newspaper that does a lot of good reporting without getting too political, seems too much to ask these days.
dgudkov 6y ago
Google and Facebook have attributes of "virtual" governments. Similarly to an IRL government, they provide to citizens identity, protection of assets, and policing. From that perspective, their ad-based monetization is indirect taxation.
collaborative 6y ago
What I truly miss is a competitor for both Google and Facebook. McDonald's has Burger King. Who do we go to when Google and Facebook overcharge us for advertising? The problem here is lack of competition Online advertising is by itself a great thing. In the past, only the likes of Unilever could afford to run ads on TV and Newspaper. That was because in order to convert they needed not just ads and an online presence. They literally needed to be on the shelves of every major shop so that the customer could complete their advertising journey I can see a competitor to Google materializing in the coming years due to Google's increasing difficulty to track user behavior. But I'm not so sure about Facebook. The only hope there is that platforms (Apple, Google and browsers) eventually force FB to become a paid service by completely disabling its tracking scripts.. which is unlikely
- marshmallow_12 6y ago
  as a browser, duckduckgo works a lot better for me then google. try it. you may still need google occasionally for specific searches and to cross reference search results, but i find it highly satisfactory. Remember, DDG is American-based and even I, a UK resident can use it well.
  - xdrosenheim 6y ago
    Unless you count that one time I accidentally searched for weather details on my watch, I have use Google search ONCE this year. DDG is absolutely fine right now. And again, unless you count my Android Auto (Google Maps) searches, I have use Google search maybe 20 times since August 2020.
- justapassenger 6y ago
  > What I truly miss is a competitor for both Google and Facebook. McDonald's has Burger King. Who do we go to when Google and Facebook overcharge us for advertising? The problem here is lack of competition You do realize that Facebook and Google are separate companies that compete with each other, same as McDonald’s and Burger King? They need more competition, that’s for sure. But they do compete with each other, same as McDonald’s and Burger King.
mensetmanusman 6y ago
The simple fix is easy: FB and Google should be _strongly_ encouraged to offer paid versions of their services that are ad free and tracking free.
- TheEzEzz 6y ago
  I've been thinking about this. There's two reasons people don't want to pay for free things: one, obviously, because they don't want to spend money; but, two, because there's friction associated with signing up to pay. If we made a law that said services like Google have to charge at least $0.01 to use, then we'd force providers and consumers to overcome the second hurdle without much cost, and make it easier for the first hurdle to be overcome over time.
  - 542354234235 6y ago
    To add, it is hard for companies to resist double dipping. Why have one revenue stream when you can have two? So you do sign up and you come to find out you were still being tracked, you still have ads, etc. You are paying and you are the product. And since services on the internet are currently very centralized, the few big players have little incentive to offer a true paid service without worrying that anyone else can break into the game and really disrupt their market share.
- marcosdumay 6y ago
  How do they not track you if when they must verify that you paid?
htk 6y ago
Misleading title and argumentation. False Cause fallacy being used to attribute paywalls to Google and Facebook.
Lazare 6y ago
There's a fair bit to agree with here, but... First, one of the arguments being made here is that previous ad revenue subsidised content, but now it subsidises social media, so content must cover its costs directly. One of the implications of that is that in the "old" system you might get a bundle of content, some of which you liked and some of which you didn't, but the whole thing was subsidised so you didn't mind this, because you weren't really paying for the bits you didn't like or didn't consume. And now in the "new" system you have to pay full freight, so you're reluctant to pay for things you don't even want. In short, it's about people saying "I don't want to pay for an entire cable package (or NYT subscription), I'd rather pay for the exact content I want because it's cheaper overall, even if it's more expensive per item". But the example given is this: > Yes, you get better, more convenient and largely ad-free viewing — but there’s a good chance you’re paying more for it. The same applies to Twitter and Substack, where signing up to just four writers’ output at $5 a month each is already more than the cost of a $17 New York Times subscription, which gives you a greater breadth of coverage. And that sounds like something quite different. If people are paying $20/month in Substack subscriptions instead of $17/month for a NYT subscription, they're not doing it to save money, but because they think they can get better content that way. In fact, at the moment I am spending $20/month across Substack and Patreon for writing I care about, while the NYT is running a promotion for an online subscription for $3/month for the first year, then $8/month thereafter, but I'm happy with the value I'm getting from Substack, and I wouldn't dream of paying for the NYT, because in my view it's not even worth $3/month. This isn't a money story, this is a quality story. And I don't think it has much to do with ad revenue either. Second: > Perhaps now we can forge a better understanding of the value of content. It costs money to produce, so it should also cost money to consume. Again, I'm paying $20/month or so to Substack (mostly) and Patreon, so clearly I agree that paying money for content is (at least sometimes) a good idea. However, I think this is just a ridiculous, meaningless platitude. Education and health care cost money to product; in most countries at least some of both are provider at no direct cost to consumers. Scarce natural resources (or broadcast spectrum) costs little or nothing to produce, but should certainly cost money to consume. And just because it cost you money to produce doesn't mean anyone will (or should) choose to pay money to consume it. I once came close to subscribing to Bloomberg, but eventually decided against it, partly because it's pricy ($35/month!), but also in large part because so much of their content is just so poorly written and poorly researched. (Matt Levine is, always, excellent, but he's very much the exception. And, of course, his content is available for free, outside the Bloomberg paywall.)
rozim 6y ago
Seems like Craigslist should be added to the list, as they hurt the classified ads business.
magicroot75 6y ago
>It costs money to produce, so it should also cost money to consume. This isn't how markets work. It costs money to consume because people aren't able to find a free substitute and the place some value in it. The cost of production is irrelevant.

240 points by chewz 6y ago

No, not all my "media" was subsidized by ads before the internet. The author also fails to support the title, other than to weakly imply that somehow excluding ads on Netlifx has something to do with increased ad revenue on Facebook.

mrweasel 6y ago
Sports was the first think that came to mind when reading the article. True, previously TV based ads where worth more, and could help pay for licensing right, but those licensing fees as also balloned and consumers have to pay more directly. Sports is one area of media that will truly be disrupted as we’re already pushing the limit of what people will pay and advertising is no longer able to pay the difference.
- dec0dedab0de 6y ago
  Especially ufc, I thought the only reason ppv could be so expensive was because people were having parties to cover it. I can't believe so many people paid so much during the pandemic.
  - oarsinsync 6y ago
    When there's nothing else to do, I can see people who are bored and lonely increasingly likely to spend money on something that they used to enjoy pre-pandemic in order to try and gain some enjoyment in an otherwise pretty depressing situation.
anon98356 6y ago
I think you have your cause and effect the wrong way around there. The argument put forward is that Netflix is forced to use a subscription model because Facebook and Google have almost complete control of the advertising market. In the specific case of Netlfix this probably isn't true as their business model is an online version of a business that already charged a subscription (cable TV). However in businesses that traditionally relied on advertising e.g. the New York Times as mentioned in the article, the transition to the internet is leading to more upfront charging i.e. Paywalls because they aren't getting the ad revenue required to offer their services for free. My personal take from the article isn't that all content use to be supported by ads (although I would suggest that a lot more of it was than most people realise). The issue is that the near duopoly Facebook and Google have on web advertising, mean those producing the content can no longer rely on advertising to fund themselves. As a result we are seeing more and more paywalls being put up to fund these businesses. The potential end result of this is that finding content will continue to be free and probably even get easier. Finding content you can consume for free however, is likely to get a lot tougher.
- fakedang 6y ago
  Just a question, what's stopping NYT from using their own native ad experience embedded into their web page instead of relying on Google and Facebook? It's not like building an onsite tracking ad is secret stuff, is it? Rather, if ads are going to be better than those on Google and Facebook, they could charge a premium simply for eyeballs right?
  - anon98356 6y ago
    I believe they do use their own ad platform. But I would guess that the pricing of ads on Facebook and Google mean that even if they could charge a premium, it wouldn't be enough to sustain the business. There is only so much of a premium you can charge before no is willing to pay for your product.
- readflaggedcomm 6y ago
  Netflix's business is an online version of their old business, which was a mail-in version of Blockbuster. No ads were involved in take-home videos, that I recall, other than late attempts at unskippable promos by the studios who released the movies themselves (that was after I gave up renting videos). I don't see any causal relationship at all.
  - anon98356 6y ago
    As I said in my second line, in the case of Netflix, I don't think this applies. Their business model has always been to charge users for content. However when looking at the rise in the number of papers going behind a paywall like the NY times, there is an argument to be made that this is being driven by the fact it is no longer viable to run an ad supported business because Google and Facebook have control of too much of the market
mattl 6y ago
Other than PBS/BBC, what other media isn't subsidized by ads?
- readflaggedcomm 6y ago
  If you mean broadcast media, there have always been independent streams and feeds supported by listeners and hobbyists. There are even more since the internet began. But I took "media" to mean something more broad, including recordings, printed literature, and performances, which traditionally were mostly ad-free (excluding periodicals).

docdeek 6y ago

> The same applies to Twitter and Substack, where signing up to just four writers’ output at $5 a month each is already more than the cost of a $17 New York Times subscription, which gives you a greater breadth of coverage. Imagine I really like hamburgers. I might choose to $5 each week on a burger and be happy with the quality of a burger made by people who only make burgers. The alternative is spending $4 a week so I could access a buffet with lower quality burgers (after all, it’s not their speciality) but also hot dogs, sandwiches, poke bowls and sushi. Trying to convince me that the buffet is a better deal just because I have access to a wider range of foods when all I really want is a burger is not a winning argument for me.

rad_gruchalski 6y ago
You can't survive on a burger a week and you will eat other food too between your $5 burgers. So maybe it's worth spending the $4 / week covering "most of the other food" you gotta eat anyway.
- docdeek 6y ago
  It’s not an exact analogy, that’s for sure. Maybe I could save it by asking where am I likely to get a better quality burger: the place that charges me $5 a week just for burgers, or the one that charges me only $4 a week AND I get a whole lot of other stuff I don’t like but could still consume
- jrumbut 6y ago
  And, to strain the metaphor further, most of the $5 burger makers are just repackaging the $4 burgers since the $4 burger makers are the ones who gather the ingredients.
- nxpnsv 6y ago
  Depends on the size of the burger I guess :D
- HPsquared 6y ago
  Paying for news has become something of a "luxury" product. In these conditions, quality and satisfaction of a niche is more important than quantity (though quantity has a quality of its own)

fwn 6y ago

They argue that the centralization of advertising forces almost all companies to offer paid services and that those services lead to the overall online experience being more expensive. They conclude that "we should recognize the trade we’ve made from ad-subsidized media to ad-subsidized search and social networking", which I guess is a well-intended statement but somewhat obvious, right? Hacker News threads are filled with users arguing that they gladly pay a lot just to avoid advertising. Their last sentence > Perhaps now we can forge a better understanding of the value of content. It costs money to produce, so it should also cost money to consume. I think is important, but maybe not for their reasons. Current paid services are sometimes very overpriced, which is partly caused by the lack of easy and scalable micro-transactions and a missing understanding of what a specific service might be worth. On the other hand there are some great services that get underused because users don't think the up-front cost are justified. The turn to subscriptions that we see in random tiny auxiliary applications is a great example of that. The developers of a small CBT-App I used for a bit thought they were worth 8 euro a month. They tried it a few months and then gave up, largely because they apparently failed to find a shared understanding of their value with their users.

sammorrowdrums 6y ago
Incidentally I started paying $5/ month each to two micropayment platforms. The first Coil[1] uses Interledger micropayments protocol, which is cool because it is easy to both monetise your content, and is decentralized in terms of payment providers and receivers. I get payed into an uphold wallet, in Fiat currency. It pays out based on time on page mostly and has Imgur, Newgrounds and Twitch using it, and lots of blogs. Downside is for mobile where you can't run browser plugins you have to use their custom FF fork browser Puma. The second one Scroll[2] is a centralised one. That has bigger names attached and removes ads from things like The Atlantic and Bloomberg. It shows you a breakdown of where your monthly fee is split. I love not receiving ads, and I hope that this tech pans out, but I am only doing it as an experiment so far. Personally I would prefer Coil and its underlying protocol to succeed. But it is highly possible these all fail. At least I am avoiding ads, while still funding content. It shows promise. - [1] https://coil.com/ https://coil.com/ - [2] https://scroll.com/ https://scroll.com/

h0nd 6y ago

>News organizations, for example, didn’t charge readers, in the misguided hope that more eyeballs on their stories would bring in more revenue from the banner ads they displayed. Which part of this is misguided? That is exactly how it works. The more ads they can show, the more they are paid.

drdec 6y ago
I believe the author is saying that the misguided part was the idea that they would get more revenue from banner ads than they would through subscriptions.
- h0nd 6y ago
  Well, that is a different statement than what he is saying.
bollorior 6y ago
Newspapers made a huge strategic error in how they approached advertising, which ultimately resulted in much of their value being essentially given away to Google. It used to be the case that much of (for example) the New York Times' advertising value came not just from the number of eyeballs, but from the specific nature of those eyeballs. Being able to target a specific category of people who read the NYT (they can afford the paper, they are likely to live in New York, they know long words, they have a specific worldview, etc) is incredibly valuable to advertisers. Market segmentation by publication is very powerful - even knowing that a viewer doesn't have much money, or hates buying things, or is cynical about advertising is more valuable than not knowing anything. It's the reason that so many niche magazines exist. Advertising to someone who cares about a very specific hobby is worth a lot. It's also the reason that most printed publications aren't free. Many could be if you take a simplistic view of the economics. However they would dilute their audience to the point where it would become less valuable to advertisers. Vogue advertises to people who want to look at fashion photos enough to pay $9 or whatever to do so. With the internet, two things changed. Firstly the fact that anyone in the world could read a given article for free, meant that the average eyeball on a NYT article was much less 'NYT-reader-ish' than an eyeball on a printed page of the paper. Secondly, tracking and analytics meant that there was much more valuable and monetizable information about that reader than the fact that they are a NYT reader. Information like all the other things they have looked at, what they've recently bought, what apps they have installed, the content of their emails. Only the big tech companies and data brokers have this info. The data that the NYT has on you is trivial in comparison. It didn't have to be this way. Newspapers could have ringfenced their own data and sold ads in a way which kept them in control. As a side effect it would have been better for their readers' privacy. They failed to understand their own business as well as Google did. Now consumers are being blamed for this, for 'making the wrong choices'. I resent this for several reasons. Firstly it is an argument which denies the nature of reality. It is analogous with telling people they shouldn't shop at Wal-Mart, because local businesses will close. The solution is to change the rules to optimize for the things that we care about. Not to rely on the unlikely event that lots of people with limited resources will all make altruistic decisions to protect the nebulous thing that you care about. Secondly these newspapers set themselves up as society's only defenders of liberty and truth against the forces of darkness. In fact, a lot of them are full of propaganda, gossip and clickbait. Some of the $5 newsletters are in a class above almost everything in these newspapers. The people writing them are (typically) experts on one topic, they love that topic passionately, they have no particular axe to grind and they have much incentives to make something high quality.

wwww4all 6y ago

Basically, the legacy establishment media is complaining about the new establishment social media. Same thing as the the obsolete horse and buggy industry complaining about the automobiles taking up all the street space and causing traffic. The establishment media got big, fat and lazy with their monopoly and selling limited ad space. When the ads space became infinite in the web, they didn’t innovate and pivot to web technologies. Google and Facebook innovated web technologies and leveraged their tools to filter and target valuable audience attention space. The establishment media is obsolete and no amount of complaining is going to change the dynamic of the web. All they can do is talk about their high school glory days of scoring 5 touchdowns in high school championship game.

villasv 6y ago

I understand the bickering between media and social networks. Aggregators have disrupted the standard media business and a clash was inevitable. Including Substack in the fight, on the other hand, is pathetic. One would expect journalists to support each other and Substack is a tool _tailored for them_.

snicksnak 6y ago
Most of the corporate press hate substack and think it's beneath them, I saw it being labeled as "onlyfans for journalists". That's coming mostly from mediocre journalists who envy substack writers with a huge profile and try to demonize them. But it also comes from institutions, like the UCLA information studies professor who tried to vilify substack writes. Matt Taibbi wrote a response worth reading https://taibbi.substack.com/p/in-defense-of-substack https://taibbi.substack.com/p/in-defense-of-substack
u678u 6y ago
I like the idea of substack, but realistically the most popular journalists will be the ones with the biggest stunts and clickbait. I just want a plain newspaper that does a lot of good reporting without getting too political, seems too much to ask these days.

dgudkov 6y ago

Google and Facebook have attributes of "virtual" governments. Similarly to an IRL government, they provide to citizens identity, protection of assets, and policing. From that perspective, their ad-based monetization is indirect taxation.

collaborative 6y ago

What I truly miss is a competitor for both Google and Facebook. McDonald's has Burger King. Who do we go to when Google and Facebook overcharge us for advertising? The problem here is lack of competition Online advertising is by itself a great thing. In the past, only the likes of Unilever could afford to run ads on TV and Newspaper. That was because in order to convert they needed not just ads and an online presence. They literally needed to be on the shelves of every major shop so that the customer could complete their advertising journey I can see a competitor to Google materializing in the coming years due to Google's increasing difficulty to track user behavior. But I'm not so sure about Facebook. The only hope there is that platforms (Apple, Google and browsers) eventually force FB to become a paid service by completely disabling its tracking scripts.. which is unlikely

marshmallow_12 6y ago
as a browser, duckduckgo works a lot better for me then google. try it. you may still need google occasionally for specific searches and to cross reference search results, but i find it highly satisfactory. Remember, DDG is American-based and even I, a UK resident can use it well.
- xdrosenheim 6y ago
  Unless you count that one time I accidentally searched for weather details on my watch, I have use Google search ONCE this year. DDG is absolutely fine right now. And again, unless you count my Android Auto (Google Maps) searches, I have use Google search maybe 20 times since August 2020.
justapassenger 6y ago
> What I truly miss is a competitor for both Google and Facebook. McDonald's has Burger King. Who do we go to when Google and Facebook overcharge us for advertising? The problem here is lack of competition You do realize that Facebook and Google are separate companies that compete with each other, same as McDonald’s and Burger King? They need more competition, that’s for sure. But they do compete with each other, same as McDonald’s and Burger King.

mensetmanusman 6y ago

The simple fix is easy: FB and Google should be _strongly_ encouraged to offer paid versions of their services that are ad free and tracking free.

TheEzEzz 6y ago
I've been thinking about this. There's two reasons people don't want to pay for free things: one, obviously, because they don't want to spend money; but, two, because there's friction associated with signing up to pay. If we made a law that said services like Google have to charge at least $0.01 to use, then we'd force providers and consumers to overcome the second hurdle without much cost, and make it easier for the first hurdle to be overcome over time.
- 542354234235 6y ago
  To add, it is hard for companies to resist double dipping. Why have one revenue stream when you can have two? So you do sign up and you come to find out you were still being tracked, you still have ads, etc. You are paying and you are the product. And since services on the internet are currently very centralized, the few big players have little incentive to offer a true paid service without worrying that anyone else can break into the game and really disrupt their market share.
marcosdumay 6y ago
How do they not track you if when they must verify that you paid?

htk 6y ago

Misleading title and argumentation. False Cause fallacy being used to attribute paywalls to Google and Facebook.

Lazare 6y ago

There's a fair bit to agree with here, but... First, one of the arguments being made here is that previous ad revenue subsidised content, but now it subsidises social media, so content must cover its costs directly. One of the implications of that is that in the "old" system you might get a bundle of content, some of which you liked and some of which you didn't, but the whole thing was subsidised so you didn't mind this, because you weren't really paying for the bits you didn't like or didn't consume. And now in the "new" system you have to pay full freight, so you're reluctant to pay for things you don't even want. In short, it's about people saying "I don't want to pay for an entire cable package (or NYT subscription), I'd rather pay for the exact content I want because it's cheaper overall, even if it's more expensive per item". But the example given is this: > Yes, you get better, more convenient and largely ad-free viewing — but there’s a good chance you’re paying more for it. The same applies to Twitter and Substack, where signing up to just four writers’ output at $5 a month each is already more than the cost of a $17 New York Times subscription, which gives you a greater breadth of coverage. And that sounds like something quite different. If people are paying $20/month in Substack subscriptions instead of $17/month for a NYT subscription, they're not doing it to save money, but because they think they can get better content that way. In fact, at the moment I am spending $20/month across Substack and Patreon for writing I care about, while the NYT is running a promotion for an online subscription for $3/month for the first year, then $8/month thereafter, but I'm happy with the value I'm getting from Substack, and I wouldn't dream of paying for the NYT, because in my view it's not even worth $3/month. This isn't a money story, this is a quality story. And I don't think it has much to do with ad revenue either. Second: > Perhaps now we can forge a better understanding of the value of content. It costs money to produce, so it should also cost money to consume. Again, I'm paying $20/month or so to Substack (mostly) and Patreon, so clearly I agree that paying money for content is (at least sometimes) a good idea. However, I think this is just a ridiculous, meaningless platitude. Education and health care cost money to product; in most countries at least some of both are provider at no direct cost to consumers. Scarce natural resources (or broadcast spectrum) costs little or nothing to produce, but should certainly cost money to consume. And just because it cost you money to produce doesn't mean anyone will (or should) choose to pay money to consume it. I once came close to subscribing to Bloomberg, but eventually decided against it, partly because it's pricy ($35/month!), but also in large part because so much of their content is just so poorly written and poorly researched. (Matt Levine is, always, excellent, but he's very much the exception. And, of course, his content is available for free, outside the Bloomberg paywall.)

rozim 6y ago

Seems like Craigslist should be added to the list, as they hurt the classified ads business.

magicroot75 6y ago

>It costs money to produce, so it should also cost money to consume. This isn't how markets work. It costs money to consume because people aren't able to find a free substitute and the place some value in it. The cost of production is irrelevant.